Tuesday, March 19, 2013

Techniques for approximate string matching

Since we are planning to add fuzzy matching of string (user names) to our "Who's Calling?" Android application, here is a list of tools and algorithms that can be useful for this task.


  1. Levenshtein distance we used this years ago in the first Casus prototype. Levenshtein is tricky name, I rememebered it as Levenstein, but as its Levenshtein distance to original name is just one, it was not too difficult to find the real one ;-) 
  2. Approximate String matching 
  3. Somehow related, and very interesting article on writing your own spell checker 


This list is no way complete, perhaps there will be a pointer to a follow-up article once there is some progress on the implementation of our text matching solution.


Please feel free to add more ideas or pointers in the comments area. Thank you.