1. A method for application-specific and customizable text similarity measurement, the method comprising the steps of: determining a string similarity score of at least two texts based upon a string similarity database, said at least two texts comprising at least one input text and at least one target text; determining a semantic similarity score of the at least two texts based upon a semantic similarity database, the semantic similarity score being determined as the sum of a distance between at least one term of each said at least two texts; mapping said at least one target text and its respective canonical representations in a mappings database; and combining the string similarity score and the semantic similarity score of the at least two texts where the combined score is a weighted sum of the string similarity score and the semantic similarity score and where said at least two texts are ranked for similarity by sorting by their respective combined string and semantic similarity scores and where said texts that are included in the mappings database are also scored by similarity of their canonical forms.