NOME is an application that will help you detect and replace proper nouns in a document. It was developed to assist legal publishers in replacing names with initials in court decisions when mandated by Law.
NOME was developed by Lexum in partnership with the Laboratoire de Recherche appliquée en linguistique informatique (RALI) de l'Université de Montréal. The development of an earlier version was in part funded by the Société québécoise d'information juridique and the Canadian Legal Information Institute (CanLII).
NOME was developed and tested for Microsoft Word (versions up to 2010), under the Windows 10 operating system.
Licence of Use
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but without any warranty; without even the implied warranty of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
Downloads
- Installation Kit (ZIP, 750 KB)
- User Guide (PDF, 500 KB)
Installation, Update and Uninstall
Important: NOME's installation requires administrator's permission on your workstation. You are likely to have these persmissions if you are using your own personal computer. If you are connected to your workstation as the user of a network at your workplace, however, the intervention of your network administrator might be needed.
To install or update NOME:
- Download and save the Installation Kit file, which includes all required files including the User guide.
- Unzip the file on your hard disk - a sub-folder called NOME will be automatically created for copying the installation files.
- Be sure that Microsoft Word is not running on your computer.
- The installation should be performed in two easy steps:
- With the administrator's permissions, copy the nome.dll in the C:\windows\system32 folder.
- Copy the following files in your User's Microsoft Word STARTUP folder (you may omit the "-fr" files if you won't work with documents in French):
- NOME_RALI.dot
- inclusions-en.doc
- inclusions-fr.doc
- exclusions-en.doc
- exclusions-fr.doc
- titles-en.doc
- titles-fr.doc
Note: you can locate your User's Microsoft Word STARTUP folder by looking into Tools > Options > File Locations in Microsoft Word. In most settings the path to this folder should be something like this: C:\Documents and Settings\[User]\Application Data\Microsoft\Word\STARTUP.
To uninstall NOME, remove the NOME_RALI.dot file from your Microsoft Word STARTUP folder. After that NOME will no more be running at Word startup. For a full uninstall, simply remove all the other NOME files which were copied in the installation process.
Running NOME
To run NOME, you must first open document with Microsoft Word. You will notice that the NOME button - a small balance symbol: 
- has been added to Word's formatting toolbar. To execute the NOME macro on the document, simply click on the NOME button. For a complete explanation on how to use NOME and its features, please refer to the User Guide.
For Developers
Nome being free, open source software, any developer interested in modifying NOME may do so in compliance with the user license after having downloading its source code. Developers wanting to provide feedback or share their modifications with other NOME users are invited to contact us. Please note however that Lexum or its partners do not represent or warrant that technical support will be provided for NOME.
Known Issues and Possible Enhancements
NOME's current version is bug-free according to daily use made by Lexum personnel. However, some minor and non frequent problems were identified:
- Non-breaking space
- A name which contains a non-breaking space character might remain undetected by the program. This problem will be solved in a subsequent version of NOME.
- Apostrophe and replacement list
- Occurrences of proper nouns which are manually added to the replacement list are not detected by NOME when they are followed by an apostrophe. For instance, if the user manually adds "Kelly" in the replacement list, NOME might not be able to detect "Kelly's". This problem will be solved in a subsequent version of NOME.
Some users have suggested certain improvements to NOME. Although these enhancements have merits, no resources are currently available to actually make them. Software developers are invited to work on these possible enhancements:
- Compatibility with other OS ans software
- It would be useful to make NOME compatible with other OS such as Linux with other word processing applications.
- Name replacement methods
- NOME allows for replacing a name by its initials followed by either one or three dots. This method is not the only possible and several courts would like to replace names by letters such as X, Y, Z.
- Settings profiles
- The inclusion, exclusion and title files as well as the replacement method may vary when a user processes documents coming from different sources. It would be useful for a user to define different settings profiles which would be easy to select when the source of the document changes.
To report a bug which is not described above, please provide details with a sample document as needed and Contact us. Valid bugs will be logged in our database and corrected if critical and as time and resources allow. Lexum and its partners do not represent or warrant that these bugs will be corrected.