string-comparison

Is there a general way to convert between a measure of similarity and a measure of distance? Consider a similarity measure like the number of 2-grams that two strings have in common. 2-grams('beta', 'delta') = 1 2-grams('apple', 'dappled') = 4 What if I need to feed this to an optimization algorithm that expects a measure of difference, like Levenshtein distance? This is just an example...I'm looking for a general solution, if one exists. Like how to go from Levenshtein distance to a measure of similarity? I appreciate any guidance you may offer. Let d denotes distance, s denotes similarity.

I have this code. It sorts correctly in French and Russian. I used Locale.US and it seems to be right. Is this solution do right with all languages out there? Does it work with other languages? For example: Chinese, Korean, Japanese... If not, what is the better solution? public class CollationTest { public static void main(final String[] args) { final Collator collator = Collator.getInstance(Locale.US); final SortedSet<String> set = new TreeSet<String>(collator); set.add("abîmer"); set.add("abîmé"); set.add("aberrer"); set.add("abhorrer"); set.add("aberrance"); set.add("abécédaire"); set.add(

Here's the problem -- I have a few thousand small text snippets, anywhere from a few words to a few sentences - the largest snippet is about 2k on disk. I want to be able to compare each to each, and calculate a relatedness factor so that I can show users related information. What are some good ways to do this? Are there known algorithms for doing this that are any good, are there any GPL'd solutions, etc? I don't need this to run in realtime, as I can precalculate everything. I'm more concerned with getting good results than runtime. I just thought I would ask the Stack Overflow community

I am creating a regex to see if the copyright info at the top of all documents is formated correctly. The copy right is long therefore my regex is long too. Lets say that the copy right info looks like: /*///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// Copyright content which is a lot goes in here. Programmer: Tono Nam /////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////*/ Then I will use the regex: var pattern = @"/\*///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// Copyright content which is a lot goes in here. Programmer

Is it possible to compare rows for similar data in SQL Server? I have a company name column in a table where company names could be somewhat similar. Here is an example of the different 8 values that represent the same 4 companies: ANDORRA WOODS ANDORRA WOODS HEALTHCARE CENTER ABC HEALTHCARE, JOB #31181 ABC HEALTHCARE, JOB #31251 ACTION SERVICE SALES, A SUBSIDIARY OF SINGER EQUIPMENT ACTION SERVICE SALES, A SUBSIDIARY OF SINGER EQUIPMENT COMPANY APEX SYSTEMS APEX SYSTEMS, INC The way I clean it right now is using Google refine where I can identify clusters of similar data values and make them

I'm fairly new to c#, and writing a simple console app as practice. I want the application to ask a question, and only progress to the next piece of code when the user input equals 'y' or 'n'. Here's what I have so far. static void Main(string[] args) { string userInput; do { Console.WriteLine("Type something: "); userInput = Console.ReadLine(); } while (string.IsNullOrEmpty(userInput)); Console.WriteLine("You typed " + userInput); Console.ReadLine(); string wantCount; do { Console.WriteLine("Do you want me to count the characters present? Yes (y) or No (n): "); wantCount = Console.ReadLine();