Edit Distance

Edit distance simply refers to the number of changes necessary to change on string into another. So the edit distance between court AND tort would be 2. See an online edit distance calculator here: http://www.ripelacunae.net/projects/levenshtein/

Limit Keyword Search to Beginning or End of the Document - Tip from Litigation Support Guru

Tonight, I'm going to share a tip from Amy Bowser-Rollins, whose site www.litigationsupportguru.com is one of the best education resources on the World Wide Web in the litigation support field. Amy is a great teacher, and she posts a new video 'fast tip' each Friday.

Recently she posted a tip on how using dtSearch you can limit for search for a string to the beginning or end of files.

So in dtSearch if you want to limit your search to X number of words at the beginning or end of a file you can enter a search in this form:

litigation w/100 xfirstword

This feature, which I was unaware of, despite having used dtSearch in the past, can be a godsend when you are retrieving information from thousands of files, both for the accuracy of your results, and the speed with which you can obtain them.

Soundex

Soundex is a phonetic algorithm widely used to associate different names that are pronounced similarly. The Soundex encoding method was developed almost a century ago and is a standard feature of many current database and electronic discovery related programs, such as the one profiled in last night's tip, Windows Grep.

The Soundex encoding method reduces any name to a three digit code preceded by a letter.

1. The first letter of the name is retained.

2. All references to h, w, a, e, i, o, u and y are dropped unless they are the first letter.

3.

b, f, p, v become 1.

c, g, j, k, q, s, x, z become 2.

d, t become 3.

l becomes 4.

m, n become 5.

r becomes 6.

4. If there are two or more letters with the same number in a name (or if two such letters are separated by an h or w), only the first is retained, even if one of the letters is the first one in the name.

5. All Soundex codes must contain a letter and three digits. If there are not enough letters in a name for there to be three digits, add zeroes. Only review letters from the start of any name until you get a letter and three digits.

So using this method the name, William becomes:

W450

Smith becomes:

S530

Brown or Braun become:

B650

Soundex is frequently employed by sites devoted to researching familiy genealogies. This site, https://www.ics.uci.edu/~dan/genealogy/Miller/javascrp/soundex.htm will generate Soundex codes for any name you enter.

Soundex is particulary useful when searching for a name in a database that may have different spellings that are hard to predict. So while you know you're looking for someone named Ismail, you may not have any idea how others will spell his name. Choose the Soundex option in Windows Grep . . .

. . . and it will automatically pull up all words with the same Soundex encoding as Ismail - I254