edit distance

A measurement of how similar two text strings are to each other. In machine learning, edit distance is useful for the following reasons: - Edit distance is easy to compute. - Edit distance can compare two strings known to be similar to each other. - Edit distance can determine the degree to which different strings are similar to a given string. Several definitions of edit distance exist, each using different string operations. See Levenshtein distance for an example.

Practitioners refer to edit distance when building, training, or evaluating machine learning systems. It appears in research papers, product documentation, and technical discussions about AI capabilities and limitations.