Applications of Approximate Word Matching in Information

As more online databases are integrated into digital libraries , the issue of quality control of the data becomes increasingly important, especially as it relates to the eeective retrieval of information. The need to discover and reconcile variant forms of strings in bibliographic entries, i.e., authority work, will become more critical in the future. Spelling variants, misspellings, and transliteration diierences will all increase the diiculty of retrieving information. Approximate string matching has traditionally been used to help with this problem. In this paper we introduce the notion of approximate word matching and show how it can be used to improve detection and categorization of variant forms. 1 Introduction There are increasingly more online databases in the current climate of electronic publishing. The challenge is to integrate them into coherent digital libraries that let users have unimpeded access to accurate information. As the pace of electronic publication accelerates, there will be increasing reliance on automated techniques to aid information providers as they seek to reach this goal. For a number of years there has been an increasing emphasis on data quality in online databases 10]. In this paper we look at techniques to aid in detecting variant forms of strings in bibliographic databases. This is called authority work 2], and results in the creation of authority les that maintain the correspondence between all of the allowable forms for strings in a particular bibliographic eld, for example author or journal name. Another problem arises when bibliographic databases are integrated. The diierent component databases might use diierent authority conventions, and users familiar with one