In this article, I presented some requirements for a similarity ranking algorithm such that it would be applicable to many domains, in many languages. I described a metric and associated algorithm that meets those requirements by comparing the adjacent character pairs contained in two strings. I illustrated the algorithm with examples, and presented a Java implementation.
To close the article, I should like to return to some of the examples quoted at the start for which I argued the inadequacy of the existing algorithms. Contrary to the Soundex algorithm and the Edit Distance, my algorithm rates the strings ‘FRANCE’ and ‘REPUBLIC OF FRANCE’ to have a good similarity of 56%. On the other hand, the strings ‘FRANCE’ and ‘QUEBEC’ are seen to be reassuringly dissimilar, with a similarity of 0%. And ‘FRENCH REPUBLIC’ is more similar to ‘REPUBLIC OF FRANCE’ than it is to ‘REPUBLIC OF CUBA’ with similarities of 72% and 61%, respectively.
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