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Compare texts and find grade of match

AndreasN
5 - Atom

Hi there,

I have an excel file with two different columns filled with text and would like to measure by rows (i.e. A2 to B2; A3 to B3...) how much (in %) these texts match with each other based on common words (punctuation is not a matching criteria; when the same word begins with a capital letter or is fully written in capital letters or only in small letters this should result in a match).

Many thanks

6 REPLIES 6
pedrodrfaria
13 - Pulsar

Hi @AndreasN 

 

Using the Fuzzy Matching would be the closest thing regarding giving you a score between a text comparison.

 

However, you can build out a logic to compare with word by word and see if the match, sum up and compare to the total and get a percentage.

 

Besides this, I dont know if there is an easy way to calculate this.

 

Pedro.

pedrodrfaria
13 - Pulsar

@AndreasN 

 

I attached one example of creating a manual calculation and scoring both string values :

 

In the example below I did only one sentence.

 

pedrodrfaria_0-1616417099246.png

 

 

echuong1
Alteryx Alumni (Retired)

You can try using fuzzy match.

 

I started by pre-processing the data with a data cleansing to remove duplicate whitespace, and change everything to uppercase to make it case insensitive. I compared all values from the text field to itself, but you can do this with two separate lists as well.

 

I added a make group and find and replace to append the "normalized" value to the end, just in case you needed it.

 

echuong1_0-1616418523908.png

 

AndreasN
5 - Atom

Hi Pedro,

Many thanks for the tips, helped me a lot to understand how to tackle my work.

Best,

Andreas

AndreasN
5 - Atom

@echoung1

Many thanks for the tips, helped me a lot to understand how to tackle my work.

Best,

Andreas

echuong1
Alteryx Alumni (Retired)

If your question is answered, please mark this thread as solved so others can find answers more easily. Thanks!

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