string-metric

I have a huge set of arbitrary natural language strings. For my tool to analyze them I need to convert each string to unique color value (RGB or other). I need color contrast to depend on string similarity (the more string is different from other, the more their respective colors should be different). Would be perfect if I would always get same color value for the same string. Any advice on how to approach this problem? Update on distance between strings I probably need "similarity" defined as a Levenstein-like distance. No natural language parsing is required. That is: "I am going to the

I would like to compare two strings and get some score how much these look alike. For example "The sentence is almost similar" and "The sentence is similar" . I'm not familiar with existing methods in Java, but for PHP I know the levenshtein function . Are there better methods in Java? Joey The Levensthein distance is a measure for how similar strings are. Or, more precisely, how many alterations have to be made that they are the same. The algorithm is available in pseudo-code on Wikipedia. Converting that to Java shouldn't be much of a problem, but it's not built-in into the base class