Chapter 4. Fuzzy string matching

In this chapter

  • Finding fuzzy string matches with prefixes and n-grams
  • Prefix matching used to perform query type-ahead
  • N-gram matching and string matching applied in query spell-checking
  • String matching techniques applied in a record matching task

One of the most difficult aspects of dealing with text is the approximate nature of many of the tasks you’d like to perform. Whether this is the relevance of search results or the clustering of similar items, what exactly is meant by relevance or similarity is difficult to specify in a way that’s both intuitive and specific. In language, we encounter this phenomenon all the time, typically with little consideration. For example, you’ll hear a new band described ...

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