Estelle Wang de-dupes text data:
Building a large high-quality corpus for Natural Language Processing (NLP) is not for the faint of heart. Text data can be large, cumbersome, and unwieldy and unlike clean numbers or categorical data in rows and columns, discerning differences between documents can be challenging. In organizations where documents are shared, modified, and shared again before being saved in an archive, the problem of duplication can become overwhelming.
To find exact duplicates, matching all string pairs is the simplest approach, but it is not a very efficient or sufficient technique. Using the MD5 or SHA-1 hash algorithms can get us a correct outcome with a faster speed, yet near-duplicates would still not be on the radar. Text similarity is useful for finding files that look alike. There are various approaches to this and each of them has its own way to define documents that are considered duplicates. Furthermore, the definition of duplicate documents has implications for the type of processing and the results produced. Below are some of the options.
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