Simphile

Python Text Similarity NLP Libray

Install

pip install simphile

Usage

Just use comparison functions to get started quickly:

from simphile import jaccard_similarity, euclidian_similarity, compression_similarity

text_a = "I love dogs"
text_b = "I love cats"

print(f"Jaccard: {jaccard_similarity(text_a, text_b)}")
print(f"Euclidian: {euclidian_similarity(text_a, text_b)}")
print(f"Compression: {compression_similarity(text_a, text_b)}")

Output:

Jaccard: 0.5
Euclidian: 0.5917517095361369
Compression: 0.6842105263157894

When you need to compare one reference text to many, it's more effecient to set up a comparison object with that text

from simphile import JaccardSimilarity, TextProcessor

reference = "the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs"
comparisons = [
    "I love dogs",
    "A fox. And a dog. Could never... be friends",
    "The LAZY DOG was annoyed by the QUICK FOX",
    "the quick dogs ran over the 23 brown carpets"
]
# TextProcessor applies the same cleaning logic to all text
processor = TextProcessor(lowercase=True, only_alphabetic=True)
# using JaccardSimilarity, but code is exactly the same with 
# CompressionSimilarity and EuclidianSimilarity
comparator = JaccardSimilarity(reference, processor)
# scoring the reference to each string in the `comparisons` list
for comparison in comparisons:
    print(f"{comparison}: {comparator.score(comparison)}")

Output:

I love dogs: 0.09090909090909091
A fox. And a dog. Could never... be friends: 0.058823529411764705
The LAZY DOG was annoyed by the QUICK FOX, 0.38461538461538464
the quick dogs ran over the 23 brown carpets: 0.5454545454545454

About

Sim•phile = "the love of similarities"

The aim is to provide easy access to text similarity methods that are language-agnostic and (ideally) much faster in execution time than methods that employ text embeddings.

• Compression Similairty – leverages the pattern recognition of compression algorithms
• Euclidian Similarity – Treats text like points in multi-dimensional space and calculates their closeness
• Jaccard Similairy – Texts are more similar the more their words overlap

Use Cases:

• When speed is required
  • fast pre-filters: Reduce a set of 10,000,000 text to the top 1000 then score those with CPU-intensive methods
• when language is unknown
• non-language comparisons (e.g. URL clustering)
• language detection (e.g. compare a text to Spanish, English, French, etc. lexicons and return match with highest score)

Use Case Example: Language detection

Here we're classifying the language of a string based on how closely it matches examples of other languages

from simphile import CompressionSimilarity, TextProcessor

# the string where we wish to detect the language
reference = "Tout est bien qui finit bien. Après la pluie, le beau temps."
# NOTE: Ideally these language examples would be large
# and representative examples of their language
language_examples = {
    "French": "Routes? Là où nous allons, nous n'avons pas besoin de routes.",
    "Spanish": "¿Carreteras? Donde vamos no necesitamos carreteras.",
    "English": "Roads? Where we're going we don't need roads.",
    "Korean": "dolo? uliga ganeun gos-eun dologa pil-yohaji anhseubnida.",
    "Hindi": "sadaken? ham jahaan ja rahe hain vahaan hamen sadakon kee jaroorat nahin hai."
}
# lower-casing all strings
processor = TextProcessor(lowercase=True)
# using compression similarity, which looks at character patterns
comparator = CompressionSimilarity(reference, processor)
# scoring the reference to each of the language strings
for language, language_example in language_examples.items():
    print(f"{language}: {comparator.score(language_example)}")

Output:

French: 0.40625
Spanish: 0.3157894736842106
English: 0.35398230088495586
Korean: 0.3839999999999999
Hindi: 0.3880597014925373

Scores are between 0 and 1, with higher scores being better. In this example, the reference text would be classified as French as that language got the best score.

Work with me!

My group is hiring two data scientists. Contact me on LinkedIn about the positions

Documentation

Simphile text similarity documentation

The /examples directory contains working code examples.

E-Z ways to help

This is a world where the more popular something is, the more quickly it improves. Help get the word out:

• Give this repo a ⭐️
• Vote up these answers on Stack Overflow 👍:
  • How to compute the similarity between two text documents?
  • How can I calculate the Jaccard Similarity of two lists containing strings in Python?
• Vote up the Reddit post

Brief Explanations

Compression Similarity

Compression algorithms find patterns in files in order to shrink them. This method uses that pattern detection to measure similarity. If a compressor can use the patterns that it found in text_a to also decently compress text_b, then that means there are similar patterns in both files. The crux of the similarity score is computed akin to this pseudocode example:

numerator = length(compress(concatenate(text_a, text_b)))
denominator = length(compress(text_a)) + length(compress(text_b))
score = numerator / denominator

Further Reading:

• "The Similarity Metric" - the origin of this method
• a nice writeup

Jaccard Similarity

All of the write-ups I have seen for Jaccard get it wrong in the implementation. They all use set() data structures. At a quick glance this makes because the method uses set arithmetic (e.g. union, intersection). However, sets don't allow duplicate elements, so this is unsatisfactory for text analysis. For example "dog cat cat cat" and "dog dog dog cat" are two very different types of pet owners, but using sets would see that as {"dog", "cat"} and another {"dog", "cat"} and 100% similar.

This imeplementation of Jaccard uses set arithmetic on lists.

Further Reading:

• Jaccard Index on Wikipedia

Euclidian Similarity

Treats tokenized words like dimensions and strings as normalized points in this multi-dimensional space and uses the above formula to calculate the distance between the two points being compared.