4 library(isub): isub: a string similarity measure

author

Giorgos Stoilos

See also

A string metric for ontology alignment by Giorgos Stoilos, 2005.

The library(isub) implements a similarity measure between strings, i.e., something similar to the Levenshtein distance. This method is based on the length of common substrings.

[det]isub(+Text1:atomic, +Text2:atomic, +Normalize:bool, -Similarity:float)

Similarity is a measure for the distance between Text1 and Text2. E.g.

?- isub('E56.Language', 'languange', true, D).
D = 0.711348.

If Normalize is true, isub/4 applies string normalization as implemented by the original authors: Text1 and Text2 are mapped to lowercase and the characters "._ " are removed. Lowercase mapping is done with the C-library function towlower(). In general, the required normalization is domain dependent and is better left to the caller. See e.g., unaccent_atom/2.

Similarity

is a float in the range [0.0..1.0], where 1.0 means most similar