How do I compare phrases for similarity?

Question

When entering a question, stackoverflow presents you with a list of questions that it thinks likely to cover the same topic. I have seen similar features on other sites or in ot

Answer 1

@Hanno you should try the Levenshtein distance algorithm. Given an input string s and a list of of strings t iterate for each string u in t and return the one with the minimum Levenshtein distance.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenshtein_distance

See a Java implementation example in http://www.javalobby.org/java/forums/t15908.html