Abstract:

Minimum editing distance is a method for comparing the degree of similarity between different symbol strings in a language. This method calculates the number of operations such as deletion, insertion, substitution in transforming between different symbol strings, and can be described algorithmically by a dynamic programming algorithm. In terminology, the minimum editing distance can be used to quantify the term features. In computational linguistics, the minimum editing distance can be used to find potential spelling errors and perform misspelling corrections. In speech recognition, minimum editing distance can be used to calculate the error rate of words. In machine translation, the minimum editing distance can be used for alignment of words in bilingual corpus.

Key words: minimum edit distance, dynamic programming algorithm, term alignment, similarity between different symbol strings