Many people comment that there are nicer string-distance measures. However the real advantage of cosine distance is that you can perform dimensionality reducti

Many people comment that there are nicer string-distance measures. However the real advantage of cosine distance is that you can perform dimensionality reduction (see e.g. page 38 of [1]). This allows you to work with very large documents efficiently and fuzzy. It also allows you to create efficient data structures for finding similar strings and much more. [1]: http://web.stanford.edu/class/cs246/slides/04-lsh_theory.pdf http://web.stanford.edu/class/cs246/slides/04-lsh_theory.pdf