Matching inexact company names in Java

Question

I have a database of companies. My application receives data that references a company by name, but the name may not exactly match the value in the database. I need to match the incoming data to the company it refers to.

For instance, my database might contain a company with name "A. B. Widgets & Co Ltd." while my incoming data might reference "AB Widgets Limited", "A.B. Widgets and Co", or "A B Widgets".

Some words in the company name (A B Widgets) are more important for matching than others (Co, Ltd, Inc, etc). It's important to avoid false matches.

The number of companies is small enough that I can maintain a map of their names in memory, ie. I have the option of using Java rather than SQL to find the right name.

How would you do this in Java?

Answer 1

You could standardize the formats as much as possible in your DB/map & input (i.e. convert to upper/lowercase), then use the Levenshtein (edit) distance metric from dynamic programming to score the input against all your known names.

You could then have the user confirm the match & if they don't like it, give them the option to enter that value into your list of known names (on second thought--that might be too much power to give a user...)

Answer 2

Although this thread is a bit old, I recently did an investigation on the efficiency of string distance metrics for name matching and came across this library:

https://code.google.com/p/java-similarities/

If you don't want to spend ages on implementing string distance algorithms, I recommend to give it a try as the first step, there's a ~20 different algorithms already implemented (incl. Levenshtein, Jaro-Winkler, Monge-Elkan algorithms etc.) and its code is structured well enough that you don't have to understand the whole logic in-depth, but you can start using it in minutes.

(BTW, I'm not the author of the library, so kudos for its creators.)

Answer 3

You can use an LCS algorithm to score them.

I do this in my photo album to make it easy to email in photos and get them to fall into security categories properly.

• LCS code
• Example usage (guessing a category based on what people entered)

Answer 4

I'd do LCS ignoring spaces, punctuation, case, and variations on "co", "llc", "ltd", and so forth.