Matchsimile: A Flexible Approximate Matching Tool for Searching Proper Names
Gonzalo Navarro, Ricardo Baeza-Yates and Joćo Marcelo Arcoverde
We present the architecture and algorithms behind Matchsimile, an
approximate string matching lookup tool especially designed for extracting
person and company names from large texts. Part of a larger information
extraction environment, this specific engine receives a large set of proper
names to search for, a text to search, and search options; and outputs
all the occurrences of the names found in the text. Beyond the similarity
search capabilities applied at the intraword level, the tool considers a set
of specific person name formation rules at the word level, such as combination,
abbreviation, duplicity detections, ordering, word omission and insertion,
among others. This engine is used in a succeeded commercial application (also
named Matchsimile), which allows searching for lawyer names in official
law publications.