NAME

Text::Compare - Language sensitive text comparison

SYNOPSIS

    use Text::Compare;
    # the instant way:
    my $tc = new Text::Compare( memoize => 1, stip_html => 0 );

    my $sim = $ts->similarity($text_a, $text_b);
    #$sim will be between 0 and 1

    # second way (cache lists):
    my $tc2 = new Text::Compare( strip_html => 1 );

    # make a language sensitive word hash:
    my %wordhash = $tc2->get_words($some_text);

    $tc2->first_list(\%wordhash);

    foreach my $list (@wordlists) {
       #list is a hashref
       $tc2->second_list($list);

       print $tc2->similarity();
    }

    # third way (cache texts) 
    my $tc3 = new Text::Compare();

    $tc3->first($some_text);
    $tc3->second($some_other_text);

    print $tc3->similarity;
     

DESCRIPTION

Text::Compare is an attempt to write a high speed text compare tool based on Vector comparision which uses language dependend stopwords. Text::Compare uses Lingua::Identify to find the language of the given texts, then uses Lingua::StopWords to get the stopwords for the given language and finally uses Linuga::Stem to find word stems.

METHODS

new( memoize => <boolean>, strip_html => <boolean> )

Creates a new Text::Compare object. Per default, Text::Compare usese memoize to cache some of the calls. See Memoize for details. If you don't want that to happen, initialize it with memoize => 0. Furthermore, Text::Compare uses HTML::Strip to stip off the HTML found in the text. If you are sure that you don't have any HTML in your data or simply want to use it, deactivate it with strip_html => 0.

similarity($text_a, $text_b)

Compares both texts and returns a similarity value between 0 and 1. Text::Compare does all this language magic, therefore two texts which address the same topic but are in different languages might get relatively high values.

LANGUAGES

Text::Compare uses the set of languages which is common to Lingua::Identify, Lingua::Stem and Lingua::StopWords, namely:

da

de

en

fr

it

no

pt

sv

AUTHOR

Marcus Thiesen, <marcus@thiesen.org>

BUGS

Please report any bugs or feature requests to bug-text-compare@rt.cpan.org, or through the web interface at http://rt.cpan.org/NoAuth/ReportBug.html?Queue=Text-Compare. I will be notified, and then you'll automatically be notified of progress on your bug as I make changes.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The actual code is heavilly based on Search::VectorSpace by Maciej Ceglowski.

COPYRIGHT & LICENSE

Copyright 2005 Marcus Thiesen, All Rights Reserved.

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

CVS

$Id: Compare.pm,v 1.8 2005/03/04 13:43:30 marcus Exp $