NAME Text-Similarity version 0.04 DESCRIPTION Text-Similarity is a Perl module that allows a user to measure the similarity between two files. There is just one method for computing similarity supported now, Text::Similarity::Overlaps, although others can be added. When using Text::Similarity::Overlaps, text similarity is based on counting the number of overlapping words between the two files, and is (optionally) normalized by the length of the files. The smallest unit we are considered for matches are white space separated strings. 'the cat and the hat' and 'these cats and these hats' will only result in similarity between 'and', matches below the word level are not measured. Each input file is treated as a single string. There are methods provided that allow you to write programs that measure files for similarity (getSimilarity) and identifying the overlaps present in strings (getOverlaps). CONTENTS When the distribution is unpacked, several subdirectories are created: /bin This directory contains a driver program called text_compare.pl that can be used to conveniently measure two files for similarity. Please see the perldoc for this program for more details. It also includes a copy of the SMART stop list (stoplist.txt) /lib This directory contains the Perl modules that do the actual work of disambiguation. By default, these files are installed into /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/PERL_VERSION (where PERL_VERSION is the version of Perl you are using). See the INSTALL file for more information. /doc This directory contains all of the *pod files used to document the system. These are processed via pod2text and the output of this is placed in the top level directory, although these top level text files should be considered read only. /t This directory contains test scripts. These scripts are run when you execute 'make test'. SEE ALSO AUTHORS Ted Pedersen, University of Minnesota, Duluth tpederse at d.umn.edu Siddharth Patwardhan sidd at cs.utah.edu Satanjeev Banerjee banerjee at cs.cmu.edu Jason Michelizzi Last modified by: $Id: README.pod,v 1.8 2008/03/21 19:00:23 tpederse Exp $ COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE Copyright (C) 2004-2008 by Jason Michelizzi, Ted Pedersen, Siddharth Patwardhan, Satanjeev Banerjee Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. Note: a copy of the GNU Free Documentation License is available on the web at and is included in this distribution as FDL.txt.