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This is an interesting problem. One obvious yet pretty much useless
algorithm is the length() function and its variations: word count, unique
word count, etc. It works similar to the genome size: measure of
information entropy potential. All the song lyrics will be pretty close to
each other and so will novels. While useless, it can handle all the
languages. <g>
Don Park
Docuverse
> -----Original Message-----
> From: David Megginson [mailto:david@megginson.com]
> Sent: Sunday, March 09, 2003 6:18 AM
> To: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
> Subject: Re: [xml-dev] [OT] Looking for a text algorithm
>
> Miles Sabin writes:
>
> > Judging from your examples it looks like you're after a closeness
> > criterion derived from longest common subsequences. But I don't see how
> > you could use that to usefully construct a single characteristic number
> > for _any_ string of _any_ length: with only 32 or 64 bits to play with,
> > many many completely unrelated (on any criterion) strings will collide
> > on the same code.
>
> Quite right. However, if the alternative is a linear search (say,
> using an edit-distance algorithm), then reducing the number of
> candidates by a few orders of magnitude would not necessarily be a bad
> thing.
>
> The problem I was considering (in the shower) was detecting spam
> messages with minor variations, such as the insertion of the
> recipient's e-mail address in the body or the substitution of Zimbabwe
> for Nigeria. Assume that I have a database containing many millions
> of known spam messages, and that I want to check an incoming e-mail
> message against it. If I can narrow the field down to, say, 50
> candidates after a very inexpensive operation, then my system will be
> much more efficient; I can then use edit-distance against the closest
> matches to see if the message really is likely spam.
>
> That said, based on private e-mail from another list member, I suspect
> that there may be nothing original about the algorithm I came up with;
> nevertheless, here it is for anyone who would care to take a peek:
>
> http://www.megginson.com/private/megginson-index-00.zip
>
>
> All the best,
>
>
> David
>
> --
> David Megginson, david@megginson.com, http://www.megginson.com/
>
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