How do I compare two sentences with similar words?

I have two string sentences with similar words, I want to know if there is a common word between them, case insensitive.

string1='Install peoplenet antenna';

string2='ANT-PMG,PEOPLENET,30';

So I want the answer to be 'true' or logical because 'peoplenet' is there in both the sentences.

Answer 1

[Sindar]

First, split each sentence into the individual words

words_1 = split(string1,[" ",","]);
words_2 = split(string2,[" ",","]);

Then check if they share any words (comparing lowercase versions)

common_words = intersect(lower(words_1),lower(words_2))
share_words = ~isempty(common_words);

[Adam Danz]

What if there are other non-letters such as (, [, {, _, ;, ., ", ', etc.?

[Sindar]

Yup, agreed that yours is more robust in that case. If you know the delimiters, mine might be better (is "ANT-PMG" one word or two? What about "30" or "John's"?).

(It looks like I was typing when you submitted your answer. Otherwise, I would have just commented on it instead of creating a separate near-duplicate answer)

[Adam Danz]

Not a problem - different approaches listed in the answers section is often helpful.

Answer 2

[Adam Danz]

I wouldn't be surprised if a more robust algorithm already exists but this simple appraoch takes the following steps.

1. Replace the non-letters with empty spaces {, . ; ( 0 - etc... }
2. Converts all characters to lower case
3. Splits the strings into words
4. Detects if there are matching words.

isMatch is the logical output that identifies if there is a match or not.

string1='Install peoplenet antenna';
string2='ANT-PMG,PEOPLENET,30';

% replace non-letters with a space and convert to lower case. 
str1 = lower(string1); 
str2 = lower(string2);
str1(~isstrprop(str1,'alpha')) = ' '; 
str2(~isstrprop(str2,'alpha')) = ' '; 

% Split the strings into words
words1 = strsplit(str1); 
words2 = strsplit(str2); 

% Detect matches
isMatch = any(ismember(words1, words2)); 

% Note, the following line will show which words were similar
% ismember(words1, words2)

[Prajwal Venkatesh]

Great!

Thanks a lot!