I am having trouble matching character strings. Most of the difficulty centers on abbreviation
I have two character vectors. I am trying to match words in vector A (typos) to the closes match in vector B.
vec.a <- c("ce", "amer", "principl")
vec.b <- c("ceo", "american", "principal")
My first crack at this was by using stringdist package fuzzy matching command. However, I can only push it so far.
amatch(vec.a, vec.b, maxDist = 3)
[1] 1 1 3
The amatch/fuzzy matching works wonderful for typos: in this case, ce -> ceo and principl -> principal. The problem arises with abbreviations. amer should be matched with american, but ce is a closer match--on account that less permutations are needed to match. How can I deal with fuzzy matching under the presence of abbreviations?
Changing the dissimilarity measure to the Jaro distance or Jaro-Winkler distance works for the example provided in your question.
library(stringdist)
vec.a <- c("ce", "amer", "principl")
vec.b <- c("ceo", "american", "principal")
amatch(vec.a, vec.b, maxDist = 1, method = "jw", p = 0) # Jaro
#> [1] 1 2 3
amatch(vec.a, vec.b, maxDist = 1, method = "jw", p = .2) # Jaro-Winkler
#> [1] 1 2 3