An approximate string match for garbled text with various accuracy

Abstract

This paper presents a fast approximate string matching method. In constructing information spaces such as digital libraries, we have to collect vast amount of information and convert it into uniformly organized data. Since much of the information must be converted from various media automatically, the space contains garbled text with various accuracy. For utilizing these texts, we need to satisfy the three requirements, i.e., high recall, high precision and fast matching process. In order to satisfy these requirements, we have been developing a two-phase matching system. The presented method is used for fast and high recall candidate word selection in the first phase. The key idea of the method is to use a portion of characters of a word and a distance pattern in order to use current index techniques. By experiments, we confirm that the presented method achieves high recall even for the poorly recognized texts.