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find the similarity between two Strings in Java

Wed May 20, 2015 7:59 pm

NGram Distance algorithm to find the similarity between two Strings in Java

java code
package simstring;
/**
* Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one or more
* contributor license agreements. See the NOTICE file distributed with
* this work for additional information regarding copyright ownership.
* The ASF licenses this file to You under the Apache License, Version 2.0
* (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with
* the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at
*
*
*
* Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
* distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
* WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
* See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
* limitations under the License.
*/

/**
* N-Gram version of edit distance based on paper by Grzegorz Kondrak,
* "N-gram similarity and distance". Proceedings of the Twelfth International
* Conference on String Processing and Information Retrieval (SPIRE 2005), pp. 115-126,
* Buenos Aires, Argentina, November 2005.
*
*
* This implementation uses the position-based optimization to compute partial
* matches of n-gram sub-strings and adds a null-character prefix of size n-1
* so that the first character is contained in the same number of n-grams as
* a middle character. Null-character prefix matches are discounted so that
* strings with no matching characters will return a distance of 0.
*
*/
public class NGramDistance implements StringDistance {

private int n;

/**
* Creates an N-Gram distance measure using n-grams of the specified size.
* @param size The size of the n-gram to be used to compute the string distance.
*/
public NGramDistance(int size) {
this.n = size;
}

/**
* Creates an N-Gram distance measure using n-grams of size 2.
*/
public NGramDistance() {
this(2);
}

@Override
public float getDistance(String source, String target) {
final int sl = source.length();
final int tl = target.length();

if (sl == 0 || tl == 0) {
if (sl == tl) {
return 1;
}
else {
return 0;
}
}

int cost = 0;
if (sl < n || tl < n) {
for (int i=0,ni=Math.min(sl,tl);i<ni;i++) {
if (source.charAt(i) == target.charAt(i)) {
cost++;
}
}
return (float) cost/Math.max(sl, tl);
}

char[] sa = new char[sl+n-1];
float p[]; //'previous' cost array, horizontally
float d[]; // cost array, horizontally
float _d[]; //placeholder to assist in swapping p and d

//construct sa with prefix
for (int i=0;i<sa.length;i++) {
if (i < n-1) {
sa[i]=0; //add prefix
}
else {
sa[i] = source.charAt(i-n+1);
}
}
p = new float[sl+1];
d = new float[sl+1];

// indexes into strings s and t
int i; // iterates through source
int j; // iterates through target

char[] t_j = new char[n]; // jth n-gram of t

for (i = 0; i<=sl; i++) {
p[i] = i;
}

for (j = 1; j<=tl; j++) {
//construct t_j n-gram
if (j < n) {
for (int ti=0;ti<n-j;ti++) {
t_j[ti]=0; //add prefix
}
for (int ti=n-j;ti<n;ti++) {
t_j[ti]=target.charAt(ti-(n-j));
}
}
else {
t_j = target.substring(j-n, j).toCharArray();
}
d[0] = j;
for (i=1; i<=sl; i++) {
cost = 0;
int tn=n;
//compare sa to t_j
for (int ni=0;ni<n;ni++) {
if (sa[i-1+ni] != t_j[ni]) {
cost++;
}
else if (sa[i-1+ni] == 0) { //discount matches on prefix
tn--;
}
}
float ec = (float) cost/tn;
// minimum of cell to the left+1, to the top+1, diagonally left and up +cost
d[i] = Math.min(Math.min(d[i-1]+1, p[i]+1), p[i-1]+ec);
}
// copy current distance counts to 'previous row' distance counts
_d = p;
p = d;
d = _d;
}

// our last action in the above loop was to switch d and p, so p now
// actually has the most recent cost counts
return 1.0f - (p[sl] / Math.max(tl, sl));
}

@Override
public int hashCode() {
return 1427 * n * getClass().hashCode();
}

@Override
public boolean equals(Object obj) {
if (this == obj) return true;
if (null == obj || getClass() != obj.getClass()) return false;

NGramDistance o = (NGramDistance)obj;
return o.n == this.n;
}

@Override
public String toString() {
return "ngram(" + n + ")";
}
}

java code
public interface StringDistance {

/**
* Returns a float between 0 and 1 based on how similar the specified strings are to one another.
* Returning a value of 1 means the specified strings are identical and 0 means the
* string are maximally different.
* @param s1 The first string.
* @param s2 The second string.
* @return a float between 0 and 1 based on how similar the specified strings are to one another.
*/
public float getDistance(String s1,String s2);

}




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