Method for finding reversed names in variable

I am working with large administrative data and have found that there are correctly-ordered names and names that are ordered in the reverse (definitely expected, but I haven't had to parse such errors before). I need to figure out which names have been reversed and correct the order of those names based on other observations of the correctly-ordered names.

Example:

tibble(names = c("MIMO DAGRYL", "LUMPERSTEIN ANASTASIA", "KEY MORPHIN", "DAGRYL MIMO", "ANASTASIA LUMPERSTEIN", "KEY MORPHIN"))

I have a dataset of first names and last names which may or may not cover the observed names.

Example:

tibble(forename = c("MIMO", "KEY", "DAVID"),
       surname = c("DAGRYL", "LUMPERSTEIN", "MORPHIN"))

I have tried probabilistic matching to no avail because the data produce too many results for the packages to handle. I would like to steer clear of fuzzy matching.

Solution

Here's a solution for this toy data example using sapply and strsplit.

names <- tibble(forename = c("MIMO", "KEY", "DAVID"), surname = c("DAGRYL", "LUMPERSTEIN", "MORPHIN"))

names.list <- lapply(names, strsplit, split=" ")

df['new_names'] <- sapply(strsplit(df$names, " "), \(x) {
                     if(any((x[1]==names.list$forename & x[2]==names.list$surname))) {
                       paste(x[1], x[2]) # do nothing
                       } else 
                         if(any((x[1]==names.list$surname & x[2]==names.list$forename))) 
                           paste(x[2], x[1]) # reverse the names
                         else paste(x[1], x[2]) # do nothing
                     } )

df
# A tibble: 6 × 2
  names                 new_names            
  <chr>                 <chr>                
1 MIMO DAGRYL           MIMO DAGRYL          
2 LUMPERSTEIN ANASTASIA LUMPERSTEIN ANASTASIA
3 KEY MORPHIN           KEY MORPHIN          
4 DAGRYL MIMO           MIMO DAGRYL          
5 ANASTASIA LUMPERSTEIN ANASTASIA LUMPERSTEIN
6 KEY MORPHIN           KEY MORPHIN

names
# A tibble: 3 × 2
  forename surname    
  <chr>    <chr>      
1 MIMO     DAGRYL     
2 KEY      LUMPERSTEIN
3 DAVID    MORPHIN