A bit-vector algorithm for computing Levenshtein and Damerau edit distances

Authors:
Heikki Hyyrö
Affiliations:
University of Tampere, Department of Computer and Information Sciences, 33014 University of Tampere, Finland
Venue:
Nordic Journal of Computing - Special issue: Selected papers of the Prague Stringology conference (PSC'02), September 23-24, 2002
Year:
2003

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Abstract

The edit distance between strings A and B is defined as the minimum number of edit operations needed in converting A into B or vice versa. The Levenshtein edit distance allows three types of operations: an insertion, a deletion or a substitution of a character. The Damerau edit distance allows the previous three plus in addition a transposition between two adjacent characters. To our best knowledge the best current practical algorithms for computing these edit distances run in time O(dm) and O(⌈m/w⌉(n + σ)), where d is the edit distance between the two strings, m and n are their lengths (m ≤ n), w is the computer word size and σ is the size of the alphabet. In this paper we present an algorithm that runs in time O(⌈d/w⌉m + ⌈n/w⌉σ) or O(⌈d/w⌉n + ⌈m/w⌉σ). The structure of the algorithm is such, that in practice it is mostly suitable for testing whether the edit distance between two strings is within some pre-determined error threshold. We also present some initial test results with thresholded edit distance computation. In them our algorithm works faster than the original algorithm of Myers.