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Levenshtein Distances

Peter Coates provides an extremely fast estimate of Levenshtein Distance:

If your application requires a precise LD value, this heuristic isn’t for you, but the estimates are typically within about 0.05 of the true distance, which is more than enough accuracy for such tasks as:

  • Confirming suspected near-duplication.

  • Estimating how much two document vary.

  • Filtering through large numbers of documents to look for a near-match to some substantial block of text.

The estimation process is pretty interesting.  Worth a read.