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Levenshtein distance
Sign in to saveAlso known as edit distance, Levenshtein edit distance
computer science metric for string similarity
In the Vinony graph
Within Vinony's link graph, Levenshtein distance is referenced by 108 other articles, and connects out to longest common subsequence problem, approximate string-matching algorithm and Jaro–Winkler distance.
It is catalogued under topics including Computational linguistics, Dynamic programming and Quantitative linguistics.
Its subject is documented across 41 Wikipedia language editions.
Key facts
- Class
- measuring the difference between two sequences
via Wikipedia infobox
Wikidata facts
- Instance of
- algorithm
- Subclass of
- edit distance
- Named after
- Vladimir Levenshtein
Show 6 more facts
- maintained by WikiProject
- WikiProject Mathematics
- discoverer or inventor
- Vladimir Levenshtein
- publication date
- 1965-00-00
- Stack Exchange tag
- stackoverflow.com/tags/levenshtein-distance
- different from
- edit distance
- studied by
- category theory
Sources (2)
via Wikidata · CC0
~15 min read
Encyclopedic overview
In information theory, linguistics, and computer science, the Levenshtein distance is a string metric for measuring the difference between two sequences. The Levenshtein distance between two words is the minimum number of single-character edits (insertions, deletions or substitutions) required to change one word into the other. It is named after Soviet mathematician Vladimir Levenshtein, who defined the metric in 1965.
Levenshtein distance may also be referred to as edit distance, although that term may also denote a larger family of distance metrics. It is closely related to pairwise string alignments.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Levenshtein distance” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.