If your AttributeGroup.Attribute mapping is getting out of hand, you could use DBM::Deep instead of a straight hash. If you're committed to a database, you could still tie a hash to an object that will query the database as appropriate. Then those replacements as easy as

s/((?:[A-Z][a-z]*)+\.(?:[A-Z][a-z]*)+)/$name_of{$1}/g;
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