Edit- and Substring-Based Similarity

As humans, we understand that “Robert Schwarz,” “Rob Shwarts,” “Bob Shvarts,” and “Schwaz, Robert” are suspiciously similar. Can we also compute scores programmatically that represent our human perception?

Let’s explore several similarity functions for texts based on edit distances or common substrings. A third class of text similarities based on vectorization is out of scope here. We use the following toy dataset here: