Metaphone Phonetic Algorithm

The Metaphone algorithm is a phonetic algorithm for indexing words by their pronunciation. It is commonly used for proper nouns, such as personal names, but can also be applied to other words. The algorithm assigns a unique code to each word based on the way it sounds when spoken. This code can then be used to index the word in a database or other data structure, allowing it to be searched and compared with other words. The Metaphone algorithm is an improved version of the Soundex algorithm, which was design ed to address some of the limitations of Soundex. It uses a more advanced set of rules to convert words into a standardized code, with the goal of improving the accuracy of the matches and reducing the number of false positives. Like Soundex, the Metaphone algorithm is commonly used in applications such as spelling correction and speech recognition.

At Tilores we use the Metaphone phonetic algorithm as one of the potential data record matching algorithms for entity resolution. These can be combined with other matching algorithms to allow fine-tuned data matching and deduplication.