1 Double Metaphone -- Phonetic string matching

The library library(double_metaphone) implements the Double Metaphone algorithm developed by Lawrence Philips and described in “The Double-Metaphone Search Algorithm” by L Philips, C/C++ User's Journal, 2000. Double Metaphone creates a key from a word that represents its phonetic properties. Two words with the same Double Metaphone are supposed to sound similar. The Double Metaphone algorithm is an improved version of the Soundex algorithm.

double_metaphone(+In, -MetaPhone)

Same as double_metaphone/3, but only returning the primary metaphone.

double_metaphone(+In, -MetaPhone, -AltMetaphone)

Create metaphone and alternative metaphone from In. The primary metaphone is based on english, while the secondary deals with common alternative pronounciation in other languages. In is either and atom, string object, code- or character list. The metaphones are always returned as atoms.

1.1 Origin and Copyright

The Double Metaphone algorithm is copied from the Perl library that holds the following copyright notice. To the best of our knowledge the Perl license is compatible to the SWI-Prolog license schema and therefore including this module poses no additional license conditions.

Copyright 2000, Maurice Aubrey <maurice@hevanet.com>. All rights reserved.

This code is based heavily on the C++ implementation by Lawrence Philips and incorporates several bug fixes courtesy of Kevin Atkinson <kevina@users.sourceforge.net>.

This module is free software; you may redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.