Missing middle names in ingestion materials

[mbollmann]

For quite some time now, it has been a recurring issue that author’s middle names are not appearing in the ingestion material for the Anthology. This creates a lot of irritation among authors who keep having to file corrections, despite their name being entered fully and correctly on OpenReview, and a lot of work for the Anthology. I could easily find dozens of issues related to missing middle names within a few minutes of searching:

#3218
#3353
#3408
#3467
#3492
#3532
#3559
#3577
#3588
#3898
#3735
#3984

I remember hearing at some point that there was a conscious decision to automatically remove middle names from author names when preparing ingestion materials (@mjpost?), but I couldn’t quickly find the source of that information or any other discussion around this, so I’m opening this issue instead. I’m not even sure if the cause for this would be in our own ingestion scripts or in ACLPUB2 (and the issue better be opened there).

In any case, if there is a step in the process that automatically filters out middle names, I would strongly question that decision and suggest that it be changed.