Approximate matching of company names

I have been able to make this work with String::Approx. I had to match one list of companies against another. The lists were made by different organizations.

First, it helps to strip the noise from the company names, such as Inc, Co, Corp, GMBH, LTD, etc.

String::Approx finds a distance by looking at insertions, deletions, and substitutions needed to transform one string to another.

A different approach, which worked better for me, was to make lists of all the substrings of length n in the source string. I called these n-tuples. I compared the percentage overlap between the n-tuple sets for each name in one list to the n-tuples for each word in the other list. The best value for the length n of the tuples was three or four.

Very close matches could be completely automated this way. For matches that were not so close, I finished the matching task manually. I made a web user interface that had a selection list of the match candidates ranked by the closeness of the match. The closeness was determined by the percentage of n-tuples that matched. I selected the best match for each entry on the amongst these top-ranked match candidates.

It should work perfectly the first time! - toma

Comment on Approximate matching of company names

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Re: Approximate matching of company names by the_0ne (Pilgrim) on Oct 19, 2003 at 18:36 UTC
A different approach, which worked better for me, was to make lists of all the substrings of length n in the source string. I called these n-tuples. I compared the percentage overlap between the n-tuple sets for each name in one list to the n-tuples for each word in the other list. The best value for the length n of the tuples was three or four. Toma, could you give me an example of what you mean by this paragraph? I don't want you to go to the trouble of code examples, I mean an example using text so I can better understand what you mean. Thanks...	[reply]
Re: Re: Approximate matching of company names by toma (Vicar) on Oct 30, 2003 at 04:26 UTC
Here is the requested example that shows how n-tuples work: In this example, take n=3. The company names to compare are "tomacorp" and "tomarcorp". The 3-tuples of tomacorp are: `tom oma mac aco cor orp` [download] The 3-tuples of tomarcorp are: `tom oma mar arc rco cor orp` [download] The tuples in common are: `tom oma cor orp` [download] Four of the six 3-tuples in tomacorp appear in tomarcorp. This is a 75% match. It should work perfectly the first time! - toma	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^3: Approximate matching of company names by jelevin (Initiate) on Jul 02, 2011 at 17:45 UTC
Is there a perl module or modules that implement this approach?	[reply]
Re^4: Approximate matching of company names by Corion (Patriarch) on Jul 02, 2011 at 18:10 UTC


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