String similarity search is a fundamental operation in data cleaning and integration. It has two variants, threshold-based string similarity search and top-k string similarity search. Existing algorithms are efficient either for the former or the latter; most of them can't support both two variants. To address this limitation, we propose a unified framework. We first recursively partition strings into disjoint segments and build a hierarchical segment tree index (HS-Tree) on top of the segments. Then we utilize the HS-Tree to support similarity search. For threshold-based search, we identify appropriate tree nodes based on the threshold to answer the query and devise an efficient algorithm (HS-Search). For top-k search, we identify promising strings with large possibility to be similar to the query, utilize these strings to estimate an upper bound which is used to prune dissimilar strings, and propose an algorithm (HS-Topk). We also develop effective pruning techniques to further improve the performance. Experimental results on real-world datasets show our method achieves high performance on the two problems and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms.
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