Matching misspelt Tamil movie names

I don’t like hunting for new songs either. Too much effort.

External recommendations like Raaga Top 10 help, but not much. I usually like only 1 of the top 10.

I don’t really know the recent music directors. But many interesting songs I’ve heard recently (like Ondra Renda in Kakka Kakka, Vaseegara in Minnale, and Kaadhalikkum in Chellame) are by Harris Jayaraj. So maybe if I can find the music directors I like, other songs by them would be good recommendations.

I have an automated way to find the music director for a movie. First, I spent a few hours renaming my MP3s to a Movie.Song.mp3 filename format (using Excel and Perl liberally). After that, I wrote a Perl program that reads movie names and the movie directors from Raaga and matches the Raaga movie names with my movie names. (Raaga has all but 5 movies whose songs I’ve heard.) Then I rate music directors based on my songs’ ratings.

Unfortunately, the matching worked only for 45% of my 273 movies. The rest were spelt differently on my list and Raaga. I checked CPAN if there was a way to match Tamil words roughly. The closest was Lingua::Phonology, but Jesse, the author, mailed me saying that was “like slicing your bread with a chainsaw”.

So I developed these rules. The -> arrow below is to be read as “is also spelt as”. By just applying them sequentially, I matched 33% more movies.

Vowel rules
AEdhiri -> Edhiri
kadhal kondEIn -> kadhal kondEn
chellamEY at end-> chellamE
sachIEn -> sachIn
marupadIUm -> marupadIYUm
OI, OY, OVI, OYI are all the same
AAthma -> Athma
azhagiya thEEye -> azhagiya thIye
abOOrva ragam -> abUrva ragam
Ignore H. It is redundant.

Consonant rules
arasakTCHi -> arasakSHi
CHippikkul muthu -> Sippikkul muthu
thenNDRal -> thenNRal
devar maHan -> devar maGan
bagaWathi -> bagaVathi
avvai shanmuGi -> avvai shanmuKi
konJi pesalam -> konCHi pesalam
anDha 7 naatkal -> anTha 7 naatkal
aBoorva sagodharargal -> aPoorva sagodharargal
agni natchaTHIRam -> agni natchaTHRam

The remaining movies either had spelling mistakes (e.g. Kilipethcu Ketkavaa) or had structural differences (Ilamai Oonjal Aadugiradhu vs Ilamai Oonjal Aadudhu). By permitting approximate matches using String::Approx, I was able to match 12% more, making my total accuracy ~90%.

Though this is good enough for identifying music directors, I’m working on improving the approximate matching rules. I hope to have 98% accuracy, and then I can match individual songs — and know who the singers are. Hopefully, this can be extended to other sites like MusicIndiaOnline, and who knows — maybe even IMDb.