How to find best fuzzy match for a string in a large string database

Question

I have a database of strings (arbitrary length) which holds more than one million items (potentially more).

I need to compare a user-provided string against the whole database and retrieve an identical string if it exists or otherwise return the closest fuzzy match(es) (60% similarity or better). The search time should ideally be under one second.

My idea is to use edit distance for comparing each db string to the search string after narrowing down the candidates from the db based on their length.

However, as I will need to perform this operation very often, I'm thinking about building an index of the db strings to keep in memory and query the index, not the db directly.

Any ideas on how to approach this problem differently or how to build the in-memory index?

Solution 1

This paper seems to describe exactly what you want.

Lucene (http://lucene.apache.org/) also implements Levenshtein edit distance.

Solution 2

You didn't mention your database system, but for PostrgreSQL you could use the following contrib module: trgm - Trigram matching for PostgreSQL

The pg_trgm contrib module provides functions and index classes for determining the similarity of text based on trigram matching.

Solution 3

If your database supports it, you should use full-text search. Otherwise, you can use an indexer like lucene and its various implementations.

Comments

[fmunshi]

The first link appears to have gone. :-/

[Peter Burns]

I emailed a contact, to see if we can track down zarawesome and fix this link. Unfortunately no direct email was provided, so..

[zaratustra]

Sorry, yeah, I don't remember what the paper was about. I suggest you search for "Levenshtein edit distance" and see what comes up.

[reinierpost]

Soundex cannot see through many misspellings or other variants. It works well on names but not on arbitrary strings.

[Oddthinking]

Interesting. I didn't know it was focussed on names. I knew NYIIS was. (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…)

[krishnakumarp]

The paper is "Fast String Correction with Levenshtein-Automata" by Klaus U. Schulz , Stoyan Mihov. CiteSeerx link is given below. citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.26.2940