A Novel Fuzzy Chinese Address Matching Engine Based on Full-text Search Technology

The ability to locate addresses is one of the most important features in an urban geographic information system. Since Chinese geocoding problem cannot be handled by the European geocoding method, some Chinese scholars did special researches on Chinese geocoding. Current researches all focus on address standardizations and models, and pay less attention to the user input and result control. We designed a novel fuzzy Chinese address matching engine to give a freedom of user input and result control. The engine is composed of an index builder and a retrieval locator based on full-text search. Furthermore, three kinds of fuzzy match methods (Searching-Box Fuzzy Single Match, One-to-One Fuzzy Single Match, and Table-Form Fuzzy Batch Match) are implemented. Through more than 50,000 pieces of address-point data from eight districts of Beijing for testing, this engine compared to traditional database retrieval system shows obvious advantages: (1)It has higher match efficiency for dealing with large data; (2)It offers greater freedom on user input and result control. In the quality test, when the threshold of fuzzy matching degree is higher than 0.75, the accuracy rate reaches to 100%, with matching rate 83% and recall rate 92% respectively.