NAME

README - General information about Text::Similarity

DESCRIPTION

Text-Similarity is a Perl module that allows a user to measure the similarity between two strings or two files. There is one method for computing similarity supported Text::Similarity::Overlaps, and others can be added.

When using Text::Similarity::Overlaps, text similarity is based on counting the number of overlapping words between the two files, and is (optionally) normalized by the length of the files.

The lesk value provided in Text::Similarity::Overlaps is based on counting the number of overlapping words and phrases between the two files, and is (optionally) normalized by the length of the files. Phrasal matches are scored more highly.

The smallest unit we are considered for matches are white space separated strings. 'the cat and the hat' and 'these cats and these hats' will only result in similarity between 'and', matches below the word level are not measured.

Each input file is treated as a single string. There are methods provided that allow you to write programs that measure files for similarity (getSimilarity) and identifying the overlaps present in strings (getOverlaps).

CONTENTS

When the distribution is unpacked, several subdirectories are created:

/bin

This directory contains a driver program called text_similarity.pl that can be used to conveniently measure two files for similarity. Please see the perldoc for this program for more details.

/lib

This directory contains the Perl modules that do the actual work of disambiguation. By default, these files are installed into /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/PERL_VERSION (where PERL_VERSION is the version of Perl you are using). See the INSTALL file for more information.

/doc

This directory contains all of the *pod files used to document the system. These are processed via pod2text and the output of this is placed in the top level directory, although these top level text files should be considered read only.

/t

This directory contains test scripts. These scripts are run when you execute 'make test'.

/samples

It includes two formats of stoplist file, one word per line (stoplist.txt) and regular expression format (stoplist-nsp.regex).

SEE ALSO

http://text-similarity.sourceforge.net

AUTHORS

 Ted Pedersen, University of Minnesota, Duluth
 tpederse at d.umn.edu

 Siddharth Patwardhan, University of Utah
 sidd at cs.utah.edu 

 Satanjeev Banerjee, Carnegie Mellon University
 banerjee at cs.cmu.edu 

 Jason Michelizzi 

 Ying Liu, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
 liux0395 at umn.edu

Last modified by: $Id: README.pod,v 1.2 2015/10/08 13:22:13 tpederse Exp $

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

Copyright (C) 2004-2008 by Jason Michelizzi, Ted Pedersen, Siddharth Patwardhan, Satanjeev Banerjee

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts.

Note: a copy of the GNU Free Documentation License is available on the web at <http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html> and is included in this distribution as FDL.txt.