I have worked on projects where I needed to extract firstnames and lastnames and if you want to use this dataset to extract names, here are some caveats:
- firstnames can be lastnames as well
- common words can be names as well
- some stop words can be names
- the order can change, you can write firstname, lastname or lastname, firstname
- Some names are as short as one letter
Using ML can be useful if you can separate people by origin or in more homogeneous population.