Matching inexact company names in Java

Question

I have a database of companies. My application receives data that references a company by name, but the name may not exactly match the value in the database. I need to match the incoming data to the company it refers to.

For instance, my database might contain a company with name "A. B. Widgets & Co Ltd." while my incoming data might reference "AB Widgets Limited", "A.B. Widgets and Co", or "A B Widgets".

Some words in the company name (A B Widgets) are more important for matching than others (Co, Ltd, Inc, etc). It's important to avoid false matches.

The number of companies is small enough that I can maintain a map of their names in memory, ie. I have the option of using Java rather than SQL to find the right name.

How would you do this in Java?

Answer 1

Your database may suport the use of Regular Expressions (regex) - see below for some tutorials in Java - here's the link to the MySQL documentation (as an example):

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/regexp.html#operator_regexp

You would probably want to store in the database a fairly complex regular express statement for each company that encompassed the variations in spelling that you might anticipate - or the sub-elements of the company name that you would like to weight as being significant.

You can also use the regex library in Java

JDK 1.4.2
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/api/java/util/regex/Pattern.html

JDK 1.5.0
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/api/java/util/regex/Matcher.html

Using Regular Expressions in Java
http://www.regular-expressions.info/java.html

The Java Regex API Explained
http://www.sitepoint.com/article/java-regex-api-explained/

You might also want to see if your database supports Soundex capabilities (for example, see the following link to MySQL)
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/string-functions.html#function_soundex

Answer 2

You can use an LCS algorithm to score them.

I do this in my photo album to make it easy to email in photos and get them to fall into security categories properly.

• LCS code
• Example usage (guessing a category based on what people entered)

Answer 3

Lucene might be useful?

Answer 4

Have a look at Lucene. It's an open source full text search Java library with 'near match' capabilities.

Answer 5

You could standardize the formats as much as possible in your DB/map & input (i.e. convert to upper/lowercase), then use the Levenshtein (edit) distance metric from dynamic programming to score the input against all your known names.

You could then have the user confirm the match & if they don't like it, give them the option to enter that value into your list of known names (on second thought--that might be too much power to give a user...)

Answer 6

I'd do LCS ignoring spaces, punctuation, case, and variations on "co", "llc", "ltd", and so forth.

Answer 7

vote up 1 vote down

You can use an LCS algorithm to score them.

I do this in my photo album to make it easy to email in photos and get them to fall into security categories properly.

* LCS code
* Example usage (guessing a category based on what people entered)

to be more precise, better than Least Common Subsequence, Least Common Substring should be more precise as the order of characters is important.