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Frontiers of Computer Science

ISSN 2095-2228

ISSN 2095-2236(Online)

CN 10-1014/TP

Postal Subscription Code 80-970

2018 Impact Factor: 1.129

Front. Comput. Sci.    2016, Vol. 10 Issue (3) : 399-417    https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-015-5900-5
REVIEW ARTICLE
String similarity search and join: a survey
Minghe YU,Guoliang LI(),Dong DENG,Jianhua FENG
Department of Computer Science, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China
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Abstract

String similarity search and join are two important operations in data cleaning and integration, which extend traditional exact search and exact join operations in databases by tolerating the errors and inconsistencies in the data. They have many real-world applications, such as spell checking, duplicate detection, entity resolution, and webpage clustering. Although these two problems have been extensively studied in the recent decade, there is no thorough survey. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey on string similarity search and join. We first give the problem definitions and introduce widely-used similarity functions to quantify the similarity. We then present an extensive set of algorithms for string similarity search and join. We also discuss their variants, including approximate entity extraction, type-ahead search, and approximate substring matching. Finally, we provide some open datasets and summarize some research challenges and open problems.

Keywords string similarity      similarity search      similarity join      top-k     
Corresponding Author(s): Guoliang LI   
Just Accepted Date: 22 October 2015   Online First Date: 06 April 2016    Issue Date: 16 May 2016
 Cite this article:   
Minghe YU,Guoliang LI,Dong DENG, et al. String similarity search and join: a survey[J]. Front. Comput. Sci., 2016, 10(3): 399-417.
 URL:  
https://academic.hep.com.cn/fcs/EN/10.1007/s11704-015-5900-5
https://academic.hep.com.cn/fcs/EN/Y2016/V10/I3/399
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