Levenshtein Distance
An edit distance metric that calculates the fewest delete, insert, and substitute operations required to change one word to another.
Plain English Explanation
An edit distance metric that calculates the fewest delete, insert, and substitute operations required to change one word to another. For example, the Levenshtein distance between the words "heart" and "darts" is three because the following three edits are the fewest changes to turn one word into the other: 1. heart → deart (substitute "h" with "d") 2. deart → dart (delete "e") 3. dart → darts (insert "s") Note that the preceding sequence isn't the only path of three edits.
How is it used?
Practitioners refer to levenshtein distance when building, training, or evaluating machine learning systems. It appears in research papers, product documentation, and technical discussions about AI capabilities and limitations.