JOURNAL OF APPLIED COMPUTER SCIENCE Vol. 26 No. 1 (2018), pp. 33-62 The Evaluation of Text String Matching Algorithms as an Aid to Image Search Joanna Ochelska-Mierzejewska1 1Lodz University of Technology Institute of Information Technology ul. Wólcza´nska215, 90-924 Łód´z,Poland
[email protected] Abstract. The main goal of this paper is to analyse intelligent text string matching methods (like fuzzy sets and relations) and evaluate their useful- ness for image search. The present study examines the ability of different algorithms to handle multi-word and multi-sentence queries. Eight different similarity measures (N-gram, Levenshtein distance, Jaro coefficient, Dice coefficient, Overlap coefficient, Euclidean distance, Cosine similarity and Jaccard similarity) are employed to analyse the algorithms in terms of time complexity and accuracy of results. The outcomes are used to develop a hi- erarchy of methods, illustrating their usefulness to image search. The search response time increases significantly in the case of data sets containing sev- eral thousand images. The findings indicate that the analysed algorithms do not fulfil the response-time requirements of professional applications. Due to its limitations, the proposed system should be considered only as an illustra- tion of a novel solution with further development perspectives. The use of Polish as the language of experiments affects the accuracy of measures. This limitation seems to be easy to overcome in the case of languages with simpler grammar rules (e.g. English). Keywords: text comparison, N-gram, Levenshtein distance, Jaro coefficient, Dice’s coefficient, Overlap coefficient, Euclidean distance, Cosine similarity, Jaccard similarity.