I'm back into working on the Universal Similarity Metric code and background reading in preparation for my DH 2010 presentation. I've done a fair bit of background reading today -- much more to do, I think -- and I've also gone back to work on my Java class, which I think will form the basis for the comparative work with ShingleCloud. I needed to add a lot of command-line switches and parameters, so I've incorporated the JOptSimple library to make it simpler to handle them. I've added these switches/parameters:

• -compare: indicates that a comparison operation should be done.
• -str1="some string": the first string for the comparison.
• -file1=somefile.txt: a path to a file, the contents of which will be used as the first string in the comparison. This is only used if str1 is not present.
• -str2="some string": the second string for the comparison.
• -file2=somefile.txt: a path to a file, the contents of which will be used as the second string in the comparison. Only used if str2 is not present.
• -reverse: indicates that the calculation should be done by performing the operation twice, the second time with the strings switched around, and averaging the results. This is available because slightly different results often appear when doing the comparison one way, as opposed to the other.

I need to add some more sophistication to this, including a -help switch to output explanations of all the switches, and possibly some other switches that allow component operations to be done without a full comparison (such as compress-and-measure).