Abstract: Disclosed is a method and apparatus for identifying similar record elements to a query, the method including receiving a query, determining an index for the query, generating candidate records from a reference list to match the query based on the index and applying any one or any combination of a q-gram filter, a length filter, and a shared character count (SCC) filter, determining similarity scores of each of the candidate records identifying records from among the candidate records having a similarity score greater than or equal to a threshold, selecting data records similar to the query based on sorting the selected records according to respective similarity scores, and outputting one or more of the selected data records.