Multi-Level Sequence Alignment : An Adaptive Control Method Between Speed and Accuracy for Document Comparison

Jong-kyu Seo, Haesung Tak, Hwan-Gue Cho

http://doi.org/

Finger printing and sequence alignment are well-known approaches for document similarity comparison. A fingerprinting method is simple and fast, but it can not find particular similar regions. A string alignment method is used for identifying regions of similarity by arranging the sequences of a string. It has an advantage of finding particular similar regions, but it also has a disadvantage of taking more computing time. The Multi-Level Alignment (MLA) is a new method designed for taking the advantages of both methods. The MLA divides input documents into uniform length blocks, and then extracts fingerprints from each block and calculates similarity of block pairs by comparing the fingerprints. A similarity table is created in this process. Finally, sequence alignment is used for specifying longest similar regions in the similarity table. The MLA allows users to change block’s size to control proportion of the fingerprint algorithm and the sequence alignment. As a document is divided into several blocks, similar regions are also fragmented into two or more blocks. To solve this fragmentation problem, we proposed a united block method. Experimentally, we show that computing document’s similarity with the united block is more accurate than the original MLA method, with minor time loss.