i am going to recommend one of Ken Williams' modules again, this time AI::Categorizer, which seems purposely designed for the problem of grouping the text.

I should add it will be much better for classifying phrases than single words, where approaches based on either phoneme matching or edit distance would be faster/better.

in particular, this module will be able to deal with the classification of your phrases into groups.

a number of different classifiers for your phrases can be used, including naive bayes, Support Vector Machines, and Decision Trees. in the pod for this module you will also find useful references on the problem.

...wufnik

-- in the world of the mules there are no rules --