SQL Query Across 2.9M Charity Pairs Exposes Limits of Spelling-Based Name Matching
Researchers at tamiz.pro ran a vector similarity analysis across 2,889,151 pairwise combinations drawn from a registry of roughly 1,700 charitable organizations to compare spelling-based and meaning-based matching methods. Traditional fuzzy matching tools like Levenshtein distance and Jaro-Winkler scoring measure character-level differences between strings, but fail to detect when two differently spelled names refer to the same entity. By contrast, sentence-transformer embeddings — specifically the all-MiniLM-L6-v2 model — placed semantically related charity names in the same region of vector space regardless of how different they looked in text. For example, 'Doctors Without Borders' and 'Médecins Sans Frontières' scored low on lexical similarity yet ranked as near-identical in semantic space. The experiment highlights a fundamental gap between edit-distance algorithms and embedding-based approaches when matching real-world organization names across languages and jurisdictions.
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