HomoglyphsCJK

An efficient and useful tool to fuzzy match Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese or Traditional Chinese words, using character visual similarity.

Installation

pip install HomoglyphsCJK

Usage

There are two functionalities of this package: use hg_distance to calculate homoglyph distance between two strings, or use hg_merge to merge two dataframes based on keys using homoglyphic edit distance which uses substitution cost considering character visual similarity.

• If you use hg_merge or hg_distance on specific language, the dict will be downloaded automatically if not already exist, otherwise load from your current directory. So please make sure you run the script from a folder that has permission to write. The available languages are [zhs, zht, ko, ja] for simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese, Korean and Japanese respectively.
• hg_merge merges two dataframes. When you merge two dataframes, you can specify the parallel argument to use multiprocessing. If you don't specify the num_workers when using parallel, it will automatically use the number of all detected CPU cores.
• Note that hg_merge de-duplicates your passed in key columns and will in the end only return one unique value of the key specified. if you need to merge panel dataset to cross-sectional dataset for instance, you can de-duplicate the panel dataset key before you pass it in, then you will need to merge back your panel data using the matched key.

from HomoglyphsCJK import  hg_distance,hg_merge
import pandas as pd
df_1 = pd.DataFrame(list(['苏萃乡','办雄','虐格给','雪拉普岗']),columns=['query'])
df_2 = pd.DataFrame(list(['雪拉普岗日','小苏莽乡','协雄','唐格给','太阳村','月亮湾']),columns=['key'])

# merge two dataframes, note that the homoglyph dict of specified language will be downloaded automatically when first run.
## run in parallel with pool of 4, if num_workers is not specified, all available CPU cores are used.
dataframe_merged = hg_merge('zhs',df_1,df_2,'query','key',homo_lambda=1, insertion=1, deletion=1,parallel=True,num_workers=4)

## not run in parallel
dataframe_merged = hg_merge('zhs',df_1,df_2,'query','key',homo_lambda=1, insertion=1, deletion=1) 
'''
lang: choose from zhs, zht, ja, ko or your own trained homoglyph dict pickle file path
dataframe 1: the first dataframe
dataframe 2: the second dataframe
key from dataframe 1
key from dataframe 2
weight on substitution homoglyph distance, default is 1
weight on insertion cost, default is 1
weight on deletion cost, default is 1
'''

• hg_distance calculates homoglyphic edit distance between two strings. The default weight on substitution, insertion, deletion is 1.

hg_distance('苏萃乡','小苏莽乡','zhs',homo_lambda=1, insertion=1, deletion=1)
# 1.88

Contributing

We encourage you to contribute to HomoglyphsCJK!

Questions

If you have any questions using this package, you can open an issue under our GitHub repository. We are maintaining and updating this package, so stay tuned!

Citation

@misc{yang2023quantifying,
      title={Quantifying Character Similarity with Vision Transformers}, 
      author={Xinmei Yang and Abhishek Arora and Shao-Yu Jheng and Melissa Dell},
      year={2023},
      eprint={2305.14672},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.CL}
}