Here's a thought. Use a thesaurus. You don't just want to fuzzy match strings, you want to match *similar* words. Oracle's "Oracle Text" does this sort of thing, even comes with a built-in thesaurus (matches wider terms to narrower terms, so, e.g. "Perl" could come up on a search on "Programming language").

That should give you a start on ideas. I'm not aware of any open source alternatives, but some search engines do similar sorts of things.

Hope that helps.

perl -e 'print "How sweet does a rose smell? "; chomp ($n = <STDIN>); 
+$rose = "smells sweet to degree $n"; *other_name = *rose; print "$oth
+er_name\n"'
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