A simple-to-use lexical analysis tool for students, researchers and interested persons to concurrently analyze and visualize the lexical similarity of multiple entities such as languages, implemented using R and Shiny.
The goal of this project was to explore the similarity of different languages based on lexical distances and visualize the results in a meaningful way. We further developed a web application and deployed it using the web application framework "Shiny" by Rstudio. The web app is available under: http://kodu.ut.ee/~jaks/langdist
To make the entities comparable, we got rid of irrelevant things such as punctuation, newline- and excessive whitespace characters. In addition we transformed all characters to lowercase since the distance measures are case sensitive.
We replaced all language-specific special characters with similar, more general characters. This process is known as transliteration (Latin to ASCII characters). For example, õ,ä,ö,ü are turned into o,a,o,u.
For a more reliable algorithm, we combined both the normalized Damerau-Levenshtein distance and the length of the longest common subsequence to create an ensemble on a 40-60 basis, that is, 40% of the final distance score is attributed to the Damerau-Levenshtein measure and 60% is attributed to LCS.
Copyright (c) 2015, Jakob Mass; Johann Lutterodt All rights reserved.
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