Hi all,

I have a database of about 150.000 string literals per day, and I need to group the similars ones into clusters.

I'm currently using the String::Similarity perl module. It works fine but I have some performance problems. With a 5000 literal collection the system takes 3minutes more or less.

Update:Consider I have 5000 news headlines and I want to group them by similarity. I actually want to cluster all headlines 80% similars. To speed up the process, I don't compare the headlines its headlines length if greater than 20%.

My code looks like: 
...
  my $docsProcessed;
  my $size = scalar (@{$arrayDocs});    
  for (my $i = 0; $i < ($size - 1); $i++) {
    # next if already processed
    next if (defined $docsProcessed->{$arrayDocs->[$i]});

    for (my $j = $i + 1; $j < ($size - 1); $j++) {
      next if (defined $docsProcessed->{$arrayDocs->[$j]});

      $similarity = similarity($arrayDocs->[$i], $arrayDocs->[$j], $se
+lf->{THRESHOLD});

      if ($similarity >= $self->{THRESHOLD}) {
          # Add the processed document into the cluster
          push (@{$clusters->{$arrayDocs->[$i]}}, $arrayDocs->[$j]);
                
                # Add the document to the processed hash
          $docsProcessed->{$arrayDocs->[$j]} = 1;
      }
    }
  }
...

[download]

I just wanted to know if there is other method, other modules o anything to speed up this process as much as possible.

Thank you very much

In reply to Fast string similarity method by icanwin

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