[R] library/function to compare two phrases?

[R. Michael Weylandt]

On Sat, Nov 17, 2012 at 11:00 PM, Brian Feeny <bfeeny at mac.com> wrote:
> I am looking for a library/function in R that can compare two phrases and give me a score, or somehow classify them as correct as possible.
>
> The "phrases" are obfuscated/messy.  I am not concerned about which is "correct" (for example spell checking), I am only concerned in grouping them
> so that I know they are the closest match.
>
> Example:
>
> I have ROW1 and ROW2 like so:
>
> ROW1                                                    ROW2
> hamburger helper                                bigmc heartkcatta
> chicken nuggets                                 chicke, nuggets, jss
> bigmac heartattack                              some sombody somehwere
> somebody somehwere                      repleh regrubmah
>
> I am looking for something that can tell me that the best match for hamburger helper is repleh regrubmah, and the same for each other row.
>
> So my goal is to write a program that foreach phrase in ROW1 runs this function against ROW2 and gives me the phrase that scored best.
>
> I have read over much of the NLP packages at http://cran.r-project.org/web/views/NaturalLanguageProcessing.html
>
> I thought lsa might be a good fit, but I am not sure.  I have limited time, so I am hoping someone can point me in a direction of what I am looking for.
>
> I have been searching for "text classifiers", perhaps this problem is referred to as something else.
>

This is outside my expertise, but if memory serves, you might benefit
from googling the Levenshtein (spelling?) distance which allows this
sort of fuzzy matching of strings.

MW