Marzal and Vidal [8] recently considered the problem of computing the normalized edit distance between two strings, and reported experimental results which demonstrated the use of the measure to recognize handwritten characters. Their paper formulated the theoretical properties of the measure and developed two algorithms to compute it. In this short communication we shall demonstrate how this measure is related to an auxiliary measure already defined in the literature -- the inter-string constrained edit distance [10,11,15]. Since the normalized edit distance can be computed efficiently using the latter, the analytic and experimental results reported in [8] can be obtained just as accurately, but more efficiently, using the strategies presented here. I. PROBLEM STATEMENT In the comparison of text patterns, phonemes and biological macromolecules a question that has attracted much interest is that of quantifying the dissimilarity between strings. A review of such distance measures and ...

We study the problem of recognizing a string Y which is the noisy version of some unknown string X * chosen from a finite dictionary, H. The traditional case which has been extensively studied in the literature is the one in which Y contains substitution, insertion and deletion (SID) errors. Although some work has been done to extend the traditional set of edit operations to include the straightforward transposition of adjacent characters 2 [14] the problem is unsolved when the transposed characters are themselves subsequently substituted, as is typical in cursive and typewritten script, in molecular biology and in noisy chain-coded boundaries. In this paper we present the first reported solution to the analytic problem of editing one string X to another, Y using these four edit operations. A scheme for obtaining the optimal edit operations has also been given. Both these solutions are optimal for the infinite alphabet case. Using these algorithms we present a syntactic pattern rec...

In this paper we present a new model for noisy channels which permit arbitrarily distributed substitution, deletion and insertion errors. Apart from its straightforward applications in string generation and recognition, the model also has potential applications in speech and unidimensional signal processing. The model is specified in terms of a noisy string generation technique. Let A be any finite alphabet and A* be the set of words over A. Given any arbitrary string U A*, we specify a stochastically consistent scheme by which this word can be transformed into any Y A*. This is achieved by specifying the process by which U is transformed by performing substitution, deletion and insertion operations. The scheme is shown to be Functionally Complete and stochastically consistent. The probability distributions for these respective operations can be completely arbitrary. Apart from presenting the channel in which all the possible strings in A* can be potentially generated, we also specify ...

In this paper we present a foundational basis for optimal and information theoretic syntactic pattern recognition. We do this by developing a rigorous model, M * , for channels which permit arbitrarily distributed substitution, deletion and insertion syntactic errors. More explicitly, if A is any finite alphabet and A * the set of words over A, we specify a stochastically consistent scheme by which a string U A * can be transformed into any Y A * by means of arbitrarily distributed substitution, deletion and insertion operations. The scheme is shown to be Functionally Complete and stochastically consistent. Apart from the synthesis aspects, we also deal with the analysis of such a model and derive a technique by which Pr[Y|U], the probability of receiving Y given that U was transmitted, can be computed in cubic time using dynamic programming. One of the salient features of this scheme is that it demonstrates how dynamic programming can be applied to evaluate quantities involv...

A typical syntactic pattern recognition (PR) problem involves comparing a noisy string with every element of a dictionary, H. The problem of classification can be greatly simplified if the dictionary is partitioned into a set of sub-dictionaries. In this case, the classification can be hierarchical -- the noisy string is first compared to a representative element of each sub-dictionary and the closest match within the sub-dictionary is subsequently located. Indeed, the entire problem of sub-dividing a set of strings into subsets where each subset contains "similar" strings has been referred to as the "String Taxonomy Problem". To our knowledge there is no reported solution to this problem (see footnote on Page 2). In this paper we shall present a learningautomaton based solution to string taxonomy. The solution utilizes the Object Migrating Automaton (OMA) whose power in clustering objects and images [33,35] has been reported. The power of the scheme for string taxonomy has been demons...

. We consider a problem which can greatly enhance the areas of cursive script recognition and the recognition of printed character sequences. This problem involves recognizing words/strings by processing their noisy subsequences. Let X * be any unknown word from a finite dictionary H. Let U be any arbitrary subsequence of X * . We study the problem of estimating X * by processing Y, a noisy version of U. Y contains substitution, insertion, deletion and generalized transposition errors -- the latter occurring when transposed characters are themselves subsequently substituted. We solve the noisy subsequence recognition problem by defining and using the constrained edit distance between X H and Y subject to any arbitrary edit constraint involving the number and type of edit operations to be performed. An algorithm to compute this constrained edit distance has been presented. Using these algorithms we present a syntactic Pattern Recognition (PR) scheme which corrects noisy tex...

In this paper we present a foundational basis for optimal and information theoretic syntactic pattern recognition. We do this by developing a rigorous model, M * , for channels which permit arbitrarily distributed substitution, deletion and insertion syntactic errors. More explicitly, if A is any finite alphabet and A * the set of words over A, we specify a stochastically consistent scheme by which a string U A * can be transformed into any Y A * by means of arbitrarily distributed substitution, deletion and insertion operations. The scheme is shown to be Functionally Complete and stochastically consistent. Apart from the synthesis aspects, we also deal with the analysis of such a model and derive a technique by which Pr[Y|U], the probability of receiving Y given that U was transmitted, can be computed in cubic time using dynamic programming. Experimental results which involve dictionaries with strings of lengths between 7 and 14 with an overall average noise of 39.75 % demons...

We study the problem of recognizing a string Y which is the noisy version of some unknown string X* chosen from a finite dictionary, H. The traditional case which has been extensively studied in the literature is the one in which Y contains substitution, insertion and deletion (SID) errors. Although some work has been done to extend the traditional set of edit operations to include the straightforward transposition of adjacent characters 2 [LW75] the problem is unsolved when the transposed characters are themselves subsequently substituted, as is typical in cursive and typewritten script, in molecular biology and in noisy chain-coded boundaries. In this paper we present the first reported solution to the analytic problem of editing one string X to another, Y using these four edit operations. A scheme for obtaining the optimal edit operations has also been given. Both these solutions are optimal for the infinite alphabet case. Using these algorithms we present a syntactic pattern reco...