Metaphone
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Metaphone is a phonetic algorithm, an algorithm for indexing words by their sound, when pronounced in English.
Metaphone was developed by Lawrence Philips as a response to deficiencies in the Soundex algorithm. It is more accurate than Soundex because it "understands" the basic rules of English pronunciation. Metaphone is available as a built-in operator in a number of systems, including later versions of PHP.
The original author later produced a new version of the algorithm, which he named Double Metaphone, that produces more accurate results than the original algorithm.
The algorithm produces keys as its output. Similar sounding words share the same keys and are of variable length.
[edit] See also
- Double Metaphone
- Levenshtein
- Soundex
- Similar Text
[edit] External links
- Survey of Phonetic Matching
- Open Source Spell Checker
- Page for PHP implementation of Metaphone
- Project Dedupe http://dedupe.sourceforge.net
- Ruby implementation included in http://rubyforge.org/projects/text
[edit] Downloadable Implementations
- Soundex, Metaphone, and Double Metaphone implementation in Java
- Soudex, Metaphone, Caverphone implementation in Python Python
- C implementation by Maurice Aubrey (Perl Compatible) C
- Text::DoubleMetaphone Perl module from CPAN
- PHP implementation by Stephen Woodbridge PHP
- OCaml implementation of Double Metaphone OCaml
- 4GL implementation by Robert Minter 4GL
- CodeProject's article about double metaphone implementations
- FileMaker Pro custom function, requiring FileMaker Pro Advanced to implement