Abstract

In this paper we examine string block edit distance, in which two strings A and B are compared by extracting collections of substrings and placing them into correspondence. This model accounts for certain phenomena encountered in important real-world applications, including pen computing and molecular biology. The basic problem admits a family of variations depending on whether the strings must be matched in their entireties, and whether overlap is permitted. We show that several variants are NPcomplete, and give polynomial-time algorithms for solving the remainder. Keywords: block edit distance, approximate string matching, sequence comparison, approximate ink matching, dynamic programming. 1 Introduction The edit distance model for string comparison [Lev66, NW70, WF74] has found widespread application in fields ranging from molecular biology to bird song classification [SK83]. A great deal of research has been devoted to this area, and numerous algorithms have been proposed for com...

Citations