Talk:Edit distance

message: As far as I know, the name 'Edit distance traditionally means Levenshtein distance in Computer Science (see ). The list presented here also has overlap with string metrics. Maybe that page could be organised into categories instead of starting this page? Klem fra Nils Grimsmo 20:04, 19 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: You're rignt. I fixed it. Touchatou (talk) 16:19, 31 October 2011 (UTC)

text: I think it would be even better to merge some of the many articles here that describe Levenshtein distance or varieties.  There are many! Rp (talk) 09:57, 1 November 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Name of article 

message: ... as well as while moving the algorithmic parts to Wagner-Fischer algorithm. This page duplicates the information on those two pages.
In the literature about this problem, edit distance is often synonymous with Levenshtein distance, although sometimes it is extended, though seldom very dramatically. See e.g. Gonzalo Navarro's Guided tour to approximate string matching, references on edit distance.
Furthermore, this page spends a lot of time discussing the W-F algorithm, even though many applications of edit distance do not use that algorithm at all, circumventing the explicit computation of pairwise distances as it is simply too expensive. Therefore, this article does not reflect the state of the art in computer science and the discussion of the algorithm should really be separated from the algorithm to compute it. (A short discussion of the W-F algorithm is featured on edit distance, of course, as it's historically important.) QVVERTYVS (hm?) 08:55, 17 January 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: Please merge the three! I'm all for it! Rp (talk) 09:10, 17 January 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: To clarify: I did not mean to merge all three into a single article. I want the material on Levenshtein distance to be split into edit distance and Wagner-Fischer algorithm, so that we have one overview of the concept and its applications, and one on the basic algorithm that computes it. QVVERTYVS (hm?) 09:24, 17 January 2014 (UTC)

text: Maybe a hatnote would be appropriate, along the lines of "This article is about the distance metric; for details of its computation, see Wagner-Fischer algorithm" (?) QVVERTYVS (hm?) 09:27, 17 January 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: I think prior to any restructuring it would pay off to hunt for all articles explaining the concept of edit distance or an algorithm to compute it (I'm sure Levenshtein_distance#See_also isn't complete), then design a new structure, and most of all, a way to make that structure immediately clear to readers, so they won't keep adding the same information in different places, or after removal, over and over and over. I stopped editing these articles after going through the Levenshtein distance page history; there is a clear lack of direction. Rp (talk) 09:38, 17 January 2014 (UTC)

text: One problem is that there is a whole space of closely related algorithms and distances, so it's not very clear how to chop it up into articles. Rp (talk) 09:38, 17 January 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: I've decided to use Navarro as my guide here, since his is one of the best cited overviews of the field. (And because I don't have a copy of Sankoff and Kruskal's book, unfortunately, but that's also quite old.) Following that, rather than random web resources, should give us a common vocabulary. QVVERTYVS (hm?) 10:54, 17 January 2014 (UTC)

text: I welcome any suggestions as to how to "beef up the article". I've tried to generalize beyond Levenshtein distance + transposition, but I certainly did not read up on all the literature that discusses substring swaps, learning edit weights and q-gram distances, so go ahead. QVVERTYVS (hm?) 22:42, 17 January 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: I want to separate the algorithmic content from the distance metric as such, and generalize the notion of Levenshtein distance in a single article edit distance. Optimizations and variants for specific distance metrics can be discussed in the page Wagner-Fischer algorithm, where IMHO they belong more properly than on a page about a distance metric that is embodied in many more algorithms than just its pairwise DP computation. QVVERTYVS (hm?) 12:18, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

text: String metric is even more problematic because it lumps together actual string metrics and similarity functions on sets and histograms. QVVERTYVS (hm?) 10:32, 23 May 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Proposed merge with [[Levenshtein distance]] 

message: Can the relationship between word metric and this article be clarified?  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 96.40.48.159 (talk) 00:23, 9 July 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Word metric?