flâneur

CS106B Soundex Search

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The coding is mostly C++ string processing, along with a little bit of file reading and use of Vector. You'll also be practicing with use of decomposition and a test-as-you-go strategy. The two files you will be editing are soundex.cpp (for the code) and short_answer.txt (for responses to thought questions). One of the more pesky features of the English language is the lack of consistency between phonetics and spelling. Matching surnames can be vexing because many common surnames come in a variety of spellings and continue to change over time and distance as a result of incorrectly inputted data, cultural differences in spelling, and transliteration errors. Traditional string matching algorithms that use exact match or partial/overlap match perform poorly in this messy milieu of real world data. In contrast, the Soundex system groups names by phonetic structure to enable matching by pronunciation rather than literal character match. This makes tasks like tracking genealogy or searching

CS106B Soundex Search Soundex Search Assignment written by Julie Zelenski For the Soundex search portion of the assignment you will: study a real-world algorithm used by the U.S. Census to encode the phonetic pronunciation of surnames. implement the algorithm, developing a function that can take surnames as input and produce phonetic encodings as output. implement a console program that allows users to input a surname and then find all matches in a database of Stanford surnames that have the same encoding. respond to a few reflective questions on the efficacy and limitations of this algorithm.

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