Looking for library to estimate likeness of two strings

[Matthew_WARREN at bnpparibas.com]

> On Wed, 06 Feb 2008 17:32:53 -0600, Robert Kern wrote:
>
> > Jeff Schwab wrote:
> ...
> >> If the strings happen to be the same length, the Levenshtein distance
> >> is equivalent to the Hamming distance.

Is this really what the OP was asking for. If I understand it correctly,
Levenshtein distance works out the number of edits required to transform
the string to the target string. The smaller the more equivalent, but with
the OP's problem I would expect


table1      table2
brian       briam
            erian


I think the OP would like to guess at 'briam' rather than 'erian', but
Levenstein would rate them equally good guesses?

I know this is pushing it more toward phonetic alaysis of the words or
something similar, and thats orders of magnitude more complex.

just in case,

http://www.linguistlist.org/sp/Software.html#97

might be a good place to start looking into it, along with the NLTK
libraries here

http://nltk.sourceforge.net/index.php/Documentation



Matt.


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