Metaphone

This transformer plugin implements the Metaphone phonetic algorithm for indexing words according to English.

Description

Metaphone is an algorithm which encodes words according to their English pronunciation. This is also what other phonetic algorithms such as Soundex do. Compared to Soundex, Metaphone’s algorithm contains a richer description of English spelling, leading to a better phonetic encoding of the input.

A description of the procedure can be found in the corresponding Wikipedia page.

Examples

We can get an idea of the output of the Metaphone algorithm using an online version of it such as the Metaphone Generator.

Illustrative examples:

• knuth leads to the encoding n0.
• school is encoded as skhl.
• encyclopedia is encoded as ensklpt.
• accuracy is encoded as akkrs.
• eccenca is encoded as eksnk.

Parameter

None

Advanced Parameter

None

Related Plugins

• soundex — The Metaphone plugin returns a phonetic encoding whose length depends on the input. The Soundex plugin returns a fixed four-character code, so it forces a much coarser normalization. This is not a similarity score; it is an encoding step.
• NYSIIS — The Metaphone plugin and the NYSIIS plugin both produce phonetic encodings, but they do so under different encoding rules. The NYSIIS plugin also exposes a refined versus non-refined mode, while the Metaphone plugin has a single fixed encoding path.

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