Lawrence Philips' Metaphone family of algorithms return a rough approximation of how an English word sounds, which should be the same for words or names that sound similar, and can be used as a lookup key. Metaphone algorithms are widely used in Spell Checkers, Search Interfaces, De-Duping programs, and Geneology Sites.
The author can be contacted at lawrence_philips at amorphics com for
support for Metaphone algorithms.
A mailing
list has been set up for the general discussion of the Metaphone algorithm.
An archive for the mailing list can be found here
May 22, 2001
A PHP Implementation of the Double Metaphone Algorithm is now available.
August 8, 2000
A C and Perl Implementation of the Double Metaphone Algorithm is now available.
May 28, 2000
Added links to several other implementations of the original Metaphone
algorithm.
May 27, 2000
There was a slight error in dmetaph-diff.txt (the list of exactly what
words Aspell with the new Double Metaphone got and the original Aspell did
not and vice versa) as the "Bad Spellers Mode" list was the same as the
"Fast Mode." This is now fixed.
To see if the Double Metaphone algorithm will lead to an improvement in suggestion strategy I substituted in it in place of the existing table-ized code and was able to archive a 1% better score based on some test data. However, for some words the new Metaphone algorithm lead to worse results. I plan on merging the new Double Metaphone algorithm into the exiting table, but will make sure that it always leads to better results by perhaps not adding some rules or adding a slight variation of the Double Metaphone rule.