similarities.levenshtein – Fast soft-cosine semantic similarity search

This module allows fast fuzzy search between strings, using kNN queries with Levenshtein similarity.

class gensim.similarities.levenshtein.LevenshteinSimilarityIndex(dictionary, alpha=1.8, beta=5.0, max_distance=2)

Retrieve the most similar terms from a static set of terms (“dictionary”) given a query term, using Levenshtein similarity.

“Levenshtein similarity” is a modification of the Levenshtein (edit) distance, defined in [charletetal17].

This implementation uses the FastSS algorithm for fast kNN nearest-neighbor retrieval.

Parameters

  • dictionary (Dictionary) – A dictionary that specifies the considered terms.

  • alpha (float, optional) – Multiplicative factor alpha for the Levenshtein similarity. See [charletetal17].

  • beta (float, optional) – The exponential factor beta for the Levenshtein similarity. See [charletetal17].

  • max_distance (int, optional) – Do not consider terms with Levenshtein distance larger than this as “similar”. This is done for performance reasons: keep this value below 3 for reasonable retrieval performance. Default is 1.

See also

WordEmbeddingSimilarityIndex

Retrieve most similar terms for a given term using the cosine similarity over word embeddings.

SparseTermSimilarityMatrix

Build a term similarity matrix and compute the Soft Cosine Measure.

References

charletetal17(1,2,3)

Delphine Charlet and Geraldine Damnati, “SimBow at SemEval-2017 Task 3: Soft-Cosine Semantic Similarity between Questions for Community Question Answering”, 2017, https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/S17-2051/.

add_lifecycle_event(event_name, log_level=20, **event)

Append an event into the lifecycle_events attribute of this object, and also optionally log the event at log_level.

Events are important moments during the object’s life, such as “model created”, “model saved”, “model loaded”, etc.

The lifecycle_events attribute is persisted across object’s save() and load() operations. It has no impact on the use of the model, but is useful during debugging and support.

Set self.lifecycle_events = None to disable this behaviour. Calls to add_lifecycle_event() will not record events into self.lifecycle_events then.

Parameters

  • event_name (str) – Name of the event. Can be any label, e.g. “created”, “stored” etc.

  • event (dict) –

    Key-value mapping to append to self.lifecycle_events. Should be JSON-serializable, so keep it simple. Can be empty.

    This method will automatically add the following key-values to event, so you don’t have to specify them:

    • datetime: the current date & time

    • gensim: the current Gensim version

    • python: the current Python version

    • platform: the current platform

    • event: the name of this event

  • log_level (int) – Also log the complete event dict, at the specified log level. Set to False to not log at all.

levsim(t1, t2, distance)

Calculate the Levenshtein similarity between two terms given their Levenshtein distance.

classmethod load(fname, mmap=None)

Load an object previously saved using save() from a file.

Parameters

  • fname (str) – Path to file that contains needed object.

  • mmap (str, optional) – Memory-map option. If the object was saved with large arrays stored separately, you can load these arrays via mmap (shared memory) using mmap=’r’. If the file being loaded is compressed (either ‘.gz’ or ‘.bz2’), then `mmap=None must be set.

See also

save()

Save object to file.

Returns

Object loaded from fname.

Return type

object

Raises

AttributeError – When called on an object instance instead of class (this is a class method).

most_similar(t1, topn=10)

kNN fuzzy search: find the topn most similar terms from self.dictionary to t1.

save(fname_or_handle, separately=None, sep_limit=10485760, ignore=frozenset({}), pickle_protocol=4)

Save the object to a file.

Parameters

  • fname_or_handle (str or file-like) – Path to output file or already opened file-like object. If the object is a file handle, no special array handling will be performed, all attributes will be saved to the same file.

  • separately (list of str or None, optional) –

    If None, automatically detect large numpy/scipy.sparse arrays in the object being stored, and store them into separate files. This prevent memory errors for large objects, and also allows memory-mapping the large arrays for efficient loading and sharing the large arrays in RAM between multiple processes.

    If list of str: store these attributes into separate files. The automated size check is not performed in this case.

  • sep_limit (int, optional) – Don’t store arrays smaller than this separately. In bytes.

  • ignore (frozenset of str, optional) – Attributes that shouldn’t be stored at all.

  • pickle_protocol (int, optional) – Protocol number for pickle.

See also

load()

Load object from file.