This class implements fast approximate string search in a large lexicon by building an n-gram lookup table. Shared n-grams between a query word and lexicon words can be used as a proxy for edit distance. For example, this might be used by a spell checker to find close matches in a dictionary.
This system is based on the paper "Finding Approximate Matches in Large Lexicons" (Zobel & Dart, 1995).
from approx_lookup_table import ApproxLookupTable
# build table
lexicon = ["Elizabeth", "Eleanor", "Eliana", "Elane"]
lt = ApproxLookupTable(lexicon)
# query
print lt.query("Ellzabeth")
>> "Elizabeth"
# query k closest
print lt.query_k("Ellzabeth", 2)
>> ["Elizabeth", "Beth"]