Package com.wcohen.secondstring

This package contains a bunch of approximate string comparators, plus code for performing controlled experiments with this.

See:
Description

Interface Summary

StringDistance

Compute the difference between pairs of strings.

Class Summary

AbstractStatisticalTokenDistance	Abstract token distance metric that uses frequency statistics.
AbstractStringDistance	Abstract StringDistance implementation, implementing a few useful defaults.
AffineGap	Affine-gap string distance, following Durban et al.
CharJaccard	Character-based Jaccard distance: the distance between two strings is the Jaccard distance of the letters in them.
CharMatchScore	Abstract distance between characters.
DirichletJS	Jensen-Shannon distance of two unigram language models, smoothed using Dirichlet prior.
DistanceFactory	Creates distance metrics from string descriptions.
Jaccard	Jaccard distance implementation.
Jaro	Jaro distance metric.
JaroWinkler	Jaro distance metric, as extended by Winkler.
JaroWinklerTFIDF	Soft TFIDF-based distance metric, extended to use "soft" token-matching with the JaroWinkler distance metric.
JelinekMercerJS	Jensen-Shannon distance of two unigram language models, smoothed using Jelinek-Mercer mixture model.
JensenShannonDistance	Distance metrics based on Jensen-Shannon distance of two smoothed unigram language models.
Level2	Generic version of Monge & Elkan's "level 2" recursive field matching.
Level2Jaro	"Level 2" recursive field matching algorithm, based on Jaro distance.
Level2JaroWinkler	"Level 2" recursive field matching algorithm, based on Jaro distance.
Level2Levenstein	"Level 2" recursive field matching algorithm using Levenstein distance.
Level2MongeElkan	Monge & Elkan's "level 2" recursive field matching algorithm.
Level2SLIM	"Level 2" recursive field matching algorithm, based on SLIM distance.
Level2SLIMWinkler	"Level 2" recursive field matching algorithm, based on SLIM distance.
Levenstein	Levenstein string distance.
MemoMatrix	A matrix of doubles, defined recursively by the compute(i,j) method, that will not be recomputed more than necessary.
Mixture	Mixture-based distance metric.
MongeElkan	The match method proposed by Monge and Elkan.
NeedlemanWunsch	Needleman-Wunsch string distance, following Durban et al.
PrintfFormat	PrintfFormat allows the formatting of an array of objects embedded within a string.
SLIM	The same-letter index mixture distance.
SlimTFIDF	Soft TFIDF-based distance metric, extended to use "soft" token-matching with the SLIM distance metric.
SLIMWinkler	SLIM distance metric, with extensions proposed by Winkler for the Jaro metric.
SmithWaterman	Smith-Waterman string distance, following Durban et al.
SoftTFIDF	TFIDF-based distance metric, extended to use "soft" token-matching.
SoftTokenFelligiSunter	Highly simplified model of Felligi-Sunter's method 1, applied to tokens.
StringWrapper	An extendible (non-final) class that implements some of the functionality of a string.
TestPackage
TestPackage.MyFixture
TFIDF	TFIDF-based distance metric.
TokenFelligiSunter	Highly simplified model of Felligi-Sunter's method 1, applied to tokens.
UnsmoothedJS	Jensen-Shannon distance of two unsmoothed unigram language models.
WinklerRescorer	Winkler's reweighting scheme for distance metrics.

Package com.wcohen.secondstring Description

This package contains a bunch of approximate string comparators, plus code for performing controlled experiments with this.

A StringDistance is the basic class for computing distances. The score() function of this class outputs a distance measure between its two arguments. The other methods are there for efficiency, so that preprocessing steps (like tokenization) can be amortized over multiple comparisons with the same string.

The way that preprocessing steps are saved is by creating a StringWrapper object which contains the preprocessed string, plus whatever else needs to be cached. To do this, extend default implementation of StringWrapper.

Almost everything in this package implements StringDistance. The only (public) exceptions are StringWrapper; PrintfFormat, pilfered from Sun to make the explanations easier; CharMatchScore, which is a character-based distance metric; and MemoMatrix, a utility for defining edit-distance-based methods.