Prhymer: How It Works

Prhymer is an algorithm I originally made for comparing two words (defined in this case to simply be sequences of phonemes) in order to see how well they rhyme i.e. how similar they are in pronunciation. (Links to my implementations can be found here). However, it can be generalized to be a global sequence alignment algorithm. The steps for this algorithm are as follows:

Had to delete all this content because the page wouldn't prerender. Nonetheless, I still have it written down somewhere.

Now, we’ve reached the end of the process with 8.45 as our similarity score before the gap penalty is applied. Applying the gap penalty to the list of indices, we get (0.25*1) + log(1) + log(2) = 0.55. This means our final similarity score will be 8.45 – 0.55 = 7.9.

But we’re not done yet. We now need to find the similarity score of SH IH1 F T ER0 on itself. This comes out to be 16. And then we calculate the similarity percentage as described in step 10 above and we get (7.9/16)*100% = 49.375%

And now we of course go through step 11 by removing the entire first row of ordered pairs in our matrix and applying steps 1-10 on that matrix and so on. I’ll spare you and myself that process though since 49.375% ends up being the highest similarity out of any of these.