In
computer science,
edit distance is a way of quantifying how dissimilar two
strings (e.g., words) are to one another by counting the minimum number of operations required to transform one string into the other. Edit distances find applications in
natural language processing, where automatic
spelling correction can determine candidate corrections for a misspelled word by selecting words from a dictionary that have a low distance to the word in question. In
bioinformatics, it can be used to quantify the similarity of
DNA sequences, which can be viewed as strings of the letters A, C, G and T.