Techniques are described relating to identifying a country (or other item) associated with an individual based on the individual's name. These techniques rely on machine learning and artificial intelligence adaptions, according to various embodiments, and allow for better identification of country than some alternative techniques. Specifically, unsupervised machine learning techniques (e.g. using a word2vec based algorithm) allow for the handling of noisy data, which can be a significant difficulty in attempting to associate a person's name to a particular country, where it may be quite difficult or even impossible to train a supervised machine learning model that can effectively make decisions on how to associate an unknown person to a particular country. Accordingly, this disclosure includes techniques related to unsupervised machine learning that are particularly helpful for solving this problem, including using a training data set that is prepared by adding country codes (or another identifier) to names.