Today I've written the bash script I'm going to be using to create arrays of data points to compare ShingleCloud with USM. This is what it does right now:

• Reads some template files from disk, to assist in building two kinds of output: an XHTML page with tabular data, and a spreadsheet in FODS (Flat Open Document Spreadsheet) format, for use in OOo Calc.
• Reads the test data in from a text file. Right now, the file contains all the test data, with one pair of text items on each line, separated by a slash. This may be quite sufficient, since I don't anticipate running tests with items larger than paragraphs, but it would also be feasible to read in a list of filenames from which to retrieve larger bits of data.
• Calls USM on each bit of the test data and retrieves the scores.
• Calls ShingleCloud twice, once with --containmentneedle and once with --containmenthaystack, and then averages their scores. With ShingleCloud, these two scores can be radically different, so averaging them is one crude approach to creating a single similarity measure. I've written to AM to ask if he uses anything more sophisticated in TEIComparator.
• Creates an XHTML document showing the input data and the results in a table.
• Creates a FODS document with the data in a table.
• Opens the XHTML file in Firefox, and the FODS file in OOo Calc.

Learned a few things I didn't know out of this process. For instance, bash can't do floating-point math (call awk instead); a FODS file is much easier to create than a full-scale Open Document file (it's just a single flat XML file); and this is how you call an external application from a bash script and return immediately, without getting your shell session hijacked by errors from the external application: `soffice -calc -nologo $FODSFILE 2>/dev/null` &