What do you think is the state of the art technique for matching a piece of text to a reference database?

The problem I'm trying to solve is that I have new strings coming in that I haven't seen before that are ***synonyms*** for existing strings in my database. For example, if I have a table of city names and I receive the strings "Jefferson City, MO" or "Jeff City" or "Jefferson City, Miss" I want them all to match to "Jefferson City, Missouri."

I first tried solving this with fuzzy matching from the fuzzywuzzy library using Levenshtein distance and that …

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