=head1 NAME

README - General information about Text::Similarity

=head1 DESCRIPTION

Text-Similarity is a Perl module that allows a user to measure the  
similarity between two strings or two files. There is one method
for computing similarity supported Text::Similarity::Overlaps, and
others can be added.

When using Text::Similarity::Overlaps, text similarity is based on 
counting the number of overlapping words between the two files, and is 
(optionally) normalized by the length of the files. 

The lesk value provided in Text::Similarity::Overlaps is based on 
counting the number of overlapping words and phrases between the two 
files, and is (optionally) normalized by the length of the files. 
Phrasal matches are scored more highly. 

The smallest unit we are considered for matches are white space 
separated strings. 'the cat and the hat' and 'these cats and these 
hats' will only result in similarity between 'and', matches below the  
word level are not measured. 

Each input file is treated as a single string. There are methods 
provided that allow you to write programs that measure files for 
similarity (getSimilarity) and identifying the overlaps present in 
strings (getOverlaps).

=head1 CONTENTS

When the distribution is unpacked, several subdirectories are created:

=over

=item /bin

This directory contains a driver program called text_similarity.pl that can 
be used to conveniently measure two files for similarity. Please see 
the perldoc for this program for more details.

=item /lib

This directory contains the Perl modules that do the actual work of
disambiguation. By default, these files are installed into
/usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/PERL_VERSION (where PERL_VERSION is the
version of Perl you are using).  See the INSTALL file for more information.

=item /doc

This directory contains all of the *pod files used to document the 
system. These are processed via pod2text and the output of this is 
placed in the top level directory, although these top level text files 
should be considered read only.

=item /t

This directory contains test scripts.  These scripts are run when you
execute 'make test'.

=item /samples

It includes two formats of stoplist file, one word per line (stoplist.txt) 
and regular expression format (stoplist-nsp.regex).

=back

=head1 SEE ALSO

L<http://www.d.umn.edu/~tpederse/text-similarity.html>

=head1 AUTHORS

 Ted Pedersen, University of Minnesota, Duluth
 tpederse at d.umn.edu

 Siddharth Patwardhan, University of Utah
 sidd at cs.utah.edu 

 Satanjeev Banerjee, Carnegie Mellon University
 banerjee at cs.cmu.edu 

 Jason Michelizzi 

 Ying Liu, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
 liux0395 at umn.edu


Last modified by:
$Id: README.pod,v 1.14 2010/06/10 21:40:59 liux0395 Exp $

=head1 COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

Copyright (C) 2004-2008 by Jason Michelizzi, Ted Pedersen, Siddharth 
Patwardhan, Satanjeev Banerjee

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or
any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts.

Note: a copy of the GNU Free Documentation License is available on the
web at <http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html> and is included in this
distribution as FDL.txt.

=cut
