Improving search result using Levenshtein distance in Java

Question

I have following working Java code for searching for a word against a list of words and it works perfectly and as expected:

public class Levenshtein {
    privat         


        

Answer 1

I tried the suggestion from the comments about sorting the matches by the distance returned by Levenshtein algo, and it seems it does produce better results.

(As I could not find how I could not find the Searcher class from your code, I took the liberty of using a different source of wordlist, Levenshtein implementation, and language.)

Using the word list provided in Ubuntu, and Levenshtein algo implementation from - https://github.com/ztane/python-Levenshtein, I created a small script that asks for a word and prints all closest words and distance as tuple.

Code - https://gist.github.com/atdaemon/9f59ad886c35024bdd28

from Levenshtein import distance
import os

def read_dict() :
    with open('/usr/share/dict/words','r') as f : 
        for line in f :
            yield str(line).strip()

inp = str(raw_input('Enter a word : '))

wordlist = read_dict()
matches = []
for word in wordlist :
    dist = distance(inp,word)
    if dist < 3 :
        matches.append((dist,word))
print os.linesep.join(map(str,sorted(matches)))

Sample output -

Enter a word : job
(0, 'job')
(1, 'Bob')
(1, 'Job')
(1, 'Rob')
(1, 'bob')
(1, 'cob')
(1, 'fob')
(1, 'gob')
(1, 'hob')
(1, 'jab')
(1, 'jib')
(1, 'jobs')
(1, 'jog')
(1, 'jot')
(1, 'joy')
(1, 'lob')
(1, 'mob')
(1, 'rob')
(1, 'sob')
...

Enter a word : checker
(0, 'checker')
(1, 'checked')
(1, 'checkers')
(2, 'Becker')
(2, 'Decker')
(2, 'cheaper')
(2, 'cheater')
(2, 'check')
(2, "check's")
(2, "checker's")
(2, 'checkered')
(2, 'checks')
(2, 'checkup')
(2, 'cheeked')
(2, 'cheekier')
(2, 'cheer')
(2, 'chewer')
(2, 'chewier')
(2, 'chicer')
(2, 'chicken')
(2, 'chocked')
(2, 'choker')
(2, 'chucked')
(2, 'cracker')
(2, 'hacker')
(2, 'heckler')
(2, 'shocker')
(2, 'thicker')
(2, 'wrecker')