Question

My current programming project is a sort of french dictionary in Java (using sqlite). I was wondering what would happen if someone wanted to find the present tense for “avoir” but typed in “avior” and how I would handle it. So I thought I could implement some sort of closest match/did you mean functionality. So my question is:

Is there a way to use the database to search for similar matches?

when I made the same program in python a while back (using xml instead) I used this system but it wasn’t very effective and required a large error margin to be somewhat effective (and subsequently suggesting words with no relevance!)… but something similar could still be useful nether the less

def getSimilar(self, word, Return = False):
    matches = list()
    for verb in self.data.getElementsByTagName("Verb"):
        for x in range(16):
            if x % 2 != 0 and x>0:
                if (x == 15 or x == 3 or x == 1): 
                    part = Dict(self.data).removeBrackets(Dict(self.data).getAccents(verb.childNodes[x].childNodes[0].data)) 
                    diff = 0
                    for char in word:
                        if (not char in part):
                            diff += 1
                    if (diff < self.similarityValue) and (-self.errorAllowance <= len(part) - len(word) <= self.errorAllowance):
                        matches.append(part)
                else:
                    for y in range(14): 
                        if (y % 2 != 0 and y>0):
                            part = Dict(self.data).getAccents(verb.childNodes[x].childNodes[y].childNodes[0].data)
                            diff = 0
                            for char in word:
                                if (not char in part):
                                    diff += 1
                            if (diff < self.similarityValue) and (-self.errorAllowance <= len(part) - len(word) <= self.errorAllowance):
                                matches.append(part)
    if not Return:
        for match in matches:
            print "Did you mean '" + match + "'?"
    if Return: return matches

Any help is welcomed!

Jamie

Answer 1

try using
https://github.com/mateusza/SQLite-Levenshtein

Works quite well