Lord Of The Strings Part 2 - Analyzing the Results
(Page 5 of 7 )
With the first pass mechanism incorporated into the algorithm as described, I found that the program runs in quite acceptable time. On my 1.6 GHz PC with 768 MB Ram using Sun's Java J2SE 1.4.2 and MySQL 3.23.49, it runs to completion in about four minutes. The java program and database both run on the same machine, so there is no network latency in this configuration. The main reason for this relatively quick execution time is the first pass mechanism that returns a subset of the whole dictionary of words. Without this mechanism, I am certain that the program would take orders of magnitude longer to finish. (And if it took longer to finish, then my idea of storing results back into the database as they are found would gain significance.)
Anyway, let's have a look at the results obtained. First of all, let's see how many exact matches were found and for which languages:
mysql
> select count(*), lang from matches where similarity=1.0 group by lang;
+----------+-----------+
| count(*) | lang |
+----------+-----------+
| 2 | DANISH |
| 7 | DUTCH |
| 3 | ENGLISH |
| 13 | FINNISH |
| 1 | FRENCH |
| 1 | GERMAN |
| 1 | HUNGARIAN |
| 7 | JAPANESE |
| 2 | LATIN |
| 2 | NORWEGIAN |
| 2 | POLISH |
| 4 | SPANISH |
| 1 | SWEDISH |
+----------+-----------+
13 rows in set (0.00 sec)
The most exact matches were found for Finnish. By executing the following query, we can inspect the words of those exact matches:
select word from matches where similarity
=1 and lang='Finnish';
The exact matches were found for the Finnish words 'andor', 'aragorn', 'arwen', 'balin', 'hobbit', 'ilmarin', 'lindon', 'maia', 'nahar', 'ori', 'rohan', 'sylvan', and 'velar'; whilst English scored exact matches for the words 'goblin', 'hobgoblin' and 'thrush'.
The following query shows the frequency with which each language was chosen as being most similar, over the whole set of 470 Tolkien words.
mysql
> select lang, count(*) as hits
from matches
group by lang
order by hits desc;
+-----------+------+
| lang | hits |
+-----------+------+
| FINNISH | 100 |
| ENGLISH | 64 |
| SPANISH | 62 |
| JAPANESE | 52 |
| DUTCH | 40 |
| LATIN | 26 |
| POLISH | 25 |
| DANISH | 19 |
| NORWEGIAN | 19 |
| FRENCH | 18 |
| HUNGARIAN | 18 |
| GERMAN | 16 |
| SWAHILI | 7 |
| SWEDISH | 4 |
+-----------+------+
14 rows in set (0.00 sec)
Next: The Finnish Line >>
More MySQL Articles
More By Simon White
