How to count frequency of strings

As a pre-processing step turn your list into a trie.

a trie, also called digital tree or prefix tree, is an ordered tree data structure that is used to store a dynamic set or associative array where the keys are usually strings. Unlike a binary search tree, no node in the tree stores the key associated with that node; instead, its position in the tree defines the key with which it is associated. All the descendants of a node have a common prefix of the string associated with that node, and the root is associated with the empty string. Values are normally not associated with every node, only with leaves and some inner nodes that correspond to keys of interest...

The term trie comes from re-trie-val...

Try this. The initial reflection is certainly expensive, but if you're going to use it many many times, which I think you will, this is most certainly a better solution what what you're proposing. I don't like using reflection, but I find myself using it when I don't like the alternative to reflection. I do think that this will save your team a lot of headache, but you must pass the name of the method (in lowercase).

In other words, rather than pass "name", you would pass "fullname" because the name of the get method is "getFullName()".

Map<String, Method> methodMapping = null;

public Object getNode(String name) {
    Map<String, Method> methods = getMethodMapping(contact.getClass());
    return methods.get(name).invoke(contact);
}

public Map<String, Method> getMethodMapping(Class<?> contact) {
    if(methodMapping == null) {
        Map<String, Method> mapping = new HashMap<String, Method>();
        Method[] methods = contact.getDeclaredMethods();
        for(Method method : methods) {
            if(method.getParameterTypes().length() == 0) {
                if(method.getName().startsWith("get")) {
                    mapping.put(method.getName().substring(3).toLower(), method);
                } else if (method.getName().startsWith("is"))) {
                    mapping.put(method.getName().substring(2).toLower(), method);
                }
            }
        }
        methodMapping = mapping;
    }
    return methodMapping;
}

If you need to access data contained within members of contact, you might consider building a wrapper class for contact which has all methods to access any information required. This would also be useful for guaranteeing that the names of the access fields will always remain the same (I.e. if wrapper class has getFullName() and you call with fullname, it will always work even if contact's getFullName() has been renamed -- it would cause compilation error before it would let you do that).

public class ContactWrapper {
    private Contact contact;

    public ContactWrapper(Contact contact) {
        this.contact = contact;
    }

    public String getFullName() {
        return contact.getFullName();
    }
    ...
}

This solution has saved me several times, namely when I wanted to have a single data representation to use in jsf datatables and when that data needed to be exported into a report using jasper (which doesn't handle complicated object accessors well in my experience).