The Levenshtein distance is an established metric to represent phonological distances between dialects. So far, this metric has usually been applied on manually transcribed word lists. In this study we introduce several extensions of the Levenshtein distance by incorporating probabilistic edit costs as well as temporal alignment costs. We tested all variants for compliance with the axioms that ...

The maximal cardinality of a code W on the unit sphere in n dimensions with (x, y) ≤ s whenever x, y ∈ W, x 6= y, is denoted by A(n, s). We use two methods for obtaining new upper bounds on A(n, s) for some values of n and s. We find new linear programming bounds by suitable polynomials of degrees which are higher than the degrees of the previously known good polynomials due to Levenshtein [11,...

In this study we develop pronunciation distances based on naive discriminative learning (NDL). Measures of pronunciation distance are used in several subfields of linguistics, including psycholinguistics, dialectology and typology. In contrast to the commonly used Levenshtein algorithm, NDL is grounded in cognitive theory of competitive reinforcement learning and is able to generate asymmetrica...

In the medical domain, especially in clinical texts, non-standard abbreviations are prevalent, which impairs readability for patients. To ease the understanding of the physicians’ notes, abbreviations need to be identified and expanded to their original forms. We present a distributional semantic approach to find candidates of the original form of the abbreviation, and combine this with Levensh...

We present in this paper an algorithm that locates similar words common to a set of strings deened over an alphabet , where the similarity is stated in terms of a Levenshtein edit distance. The comparison of the words in the strings is realized by using a reference object called a model which is a word over. This allows us to perform a multiple comparison of the strings as opposed to pairwise c...

Misspelled query due to homophones or mispronunciation is difficult to be corrected in the conventional spelling correction methods. In phonetic candidate generation, the generator is to produce candidates which are phonetically similar to a given query. In this paper, we present a new phonetic candidate generator for improving the search efficiency of a query. The proposed generator consists o...

In this paper we use the Reeks Nederlandse Dialectatlassen as a source for the reconstruction of a ‘proto-language’ of Dutch dialects. We used 360 dialects from locations in the Netherlands, the northern part of Belgium and French-Flanders. The density of dialect locations is about the same everywhere. For each dialect we reconstructed 85 words. For the reconstruction of vowels we used knowledg...

We improve Levenshtein’s upper bound for the cardinality of a code of length four that is capable of correcting single deletions over an alphabet of even size. We also illustrate that the new upper bound is sharp. Furthermore we construct an optimal perfect code that is capable of correcting single deletions for the same parameters.

The idea that the distance among pairs of languages can be evaluated from lexical differences seems to have its roots in the work of the French explorer Dumont D’Urville. He collected comparative words lists of various languages during his voyages aboard the Astrolabe from 1826 to 1829 and, in his work about the geographical division of the Pacific, he proposed a method to measure the degree of...