Combining string and phonetic similarity matching to identify misspelt names of drugs in medical records written in Portuguese

BACKGROUND: There is an increasing amount of unstructured medical data that can be analysed for different purposes. However, information extraction from free text data may be particularly inefficient in the presence of spelling errors. Existing approaches use string similarity methods to search for valid words within a text, coupled with a supporting dictionary. However, they are not rich enough to encode both typing and phonetic misspellings. RESULTS: Experimental results showed a joint string and language-dependent phonetic similarity is more accurate than traditional string distance metrics when identifying misspelt names of drugs in a set of medical records written in Portuguese. CONCLUSION: We present a hybrid approach to efficiently perform similarity match that overcomes the loss of information inherit from using either exact match search or string based similarity search methods.