Golang : How to find out similarity between two strings with Jaro-Winkler Distance?
There are times when we need to detect if a paragraph or an article has a pattern of using multiple words with high similarities. This is useful in situation such as detecting a pattern to see if it is written by a same person, multiple persons or generated by computer programs. One way to do this is to use the Jaro-Winkler Distance algorithm and the code below demonstrate how Jaro-Winkler distance is implemented.
Here you go!
package main
import (
"fmt"
"strings"
)
func main() {
fmt.Printf("example - existence -> %0.5f\n", JaroWinklerDistance("example", "existence"))
fmt.Printf("feel - fill -> %0.5f\n", JaroWinklerDistance("feel", "fill"))
fmt.Printf("octopus - -> %0.5f\n", JaroWinklerDistance("octopus", ""))
fmt.Printf("stick - stix -> %0.5f\n", JaroWinklerDistance("stick", "stix"))
fmt.Printf("top - stop -> %0.5f\n", JaroWinklerDistance("top", "stop"))
fmt.Printf("tick - lick -> %0.5f\n", JaroWinklerDistance("tick", "lick"))
fmt.Printf("golang - Golang -> %0.5f\n", JaroWinklerDistance("golang", "golang"))
}
// JaroWinklerDistance - calculate and return the Jaro-Winkler distance
func JaroWinklerDistance(s1, s2 string) float64 {
s1Matches := make([]bool, len(s1)) // |s1|
s2Matches := make([]bool, len(s2)) // |s2|
var matchingCharacters = 0.0
var transpositions = 0.0
// sanity checks
// return 0 if either one is empty string
if len(s1) == 0 || len(s2) == 0 {
return 0 // no similarity
}
// return 1 if both strings are empty
if len(s1) == 0 && len(s2) == 0 {
return 1 // exact match
}
if strings.EqualFold(s1, s2) { // case insensitive
return 1 // exact match
}
// Two characters from s1 and s2 respectively,
// are considered matching only if they are the same and not farther than
// [ max(|s1|,|s2|) / 2 ] - 1
matchDistance := len(s1)
if len(s2) > matchDistance {
matchDistance = len(s2)
}
matchDistance = matchDistance/2 - 1
// Each character of s1 is compared with all its matching characters in s2
for i := range s1 {
low := i - matchDistance
if low < 0 {
low = 0
}
high := i + matchDistance + 1
if high > len(s2) {
high = len(s2)
}
for j := low; j < high; j++ {
if s2Matches[j] {
continue
}
if s1[i] != s2[j] {
continue
}
s1Matches[i] = true
s2Matches[j] = true
matchingCharacters++
break
}
}
if matchingCharacters == 0 {
return 0 // no similarity, exit early
}
// Count the transpositions.
// The number of matching (but different sequence order) characters divided by 2 defines the number of transpositions
k := 0
for i := range s1 {
if !s1Matches[i] {
continue
}
for !s2Matches[k] {
k++
}
if s1[i] != s2[k] {
transpositions++ // increase transpositions
}
k++
}
transpositions /= 2
weight := (matchingCharacters/float64(len(s1)) + matchingCharacters/float64(len(s2)) + (matchingCharacters-transpositions)/matchingCharacters) / 3
// the length of common prefix at the start of the string up to a maximum of four characters
l := 0
// is a constant scaling factor for how much the score is adjusted upwards for having common prefixes.
//The standard value for this constant in Winkler's work is {\displaystyle p=0.1}p=0.1
p := 0.1
// make it easier for s1[l] == s2[l] comparison
s1 = strings.ToLower(s1)
s2 = strings.ToLower(s2)
if weight > 0.7 {
for (l < 4) && s1[l] == s2[l] {
l++
}
weight = weight + float64(l)*p*(1-weight)
}
return weight
}
Output:
example - existence -> 0.58730
feel - fill -> 0.66667
octopus - -> 0.00000
stick - stix -> 0.84833
top - stop -> 0.91667
tick - lick -> 0.83333
golang - Golang -> 1.00000
Happy coding!
References :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaro%E2%80%93Winkler_distance
https://github.com/jordanthomas/jaro-winkler/blob/master/index.js
See also : Golang : Levenshtein distance example
By Adam Ng(黃武俊)
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