METHOD AND SYSTEM FOR COMPARING STRINGS WITH ENTRIES OF A LEXICON

A system and method for more efficiently comparing an unverified string to a lexicon, which filters the lexicon through multiple steps to reduce the number of entries to be directly compared with the unverified string. The method begins by preparing the lexicon with an n-gram encoding, partitioning and hashing process, which can be accomplished in advance of any processing of unverified strings. The unknown is compared first by partitioning and hashing it in the same way to reduce the lexicon in a computationally inexpensive manner. This is followed by an encoded vector comparison step, and finally by a direct string comparison step, which is the most computationally expensive. The reduction of the lexicon is accomplished without arbitrarily eliminating any large portions of the lexicon that might contain relevant candidates. At the same time, the method avoids the need to compare the unverified string directly or indirectly with all the entries in the lexicon. The final candidate list includes only highly possible and ranked candidates for the unverified string, and the size of the final list is adjustable.