A fast algorithm for finding the nearest neighbor of a word in a dictionary

A new algorithm for string edit distance computation is proposed. It needs time that is only linear in the length of one of the two strings to be matched, provided that the other string has undergone some preprocessing in an off-line phase. The algorithm can be extended to matching a word against a dictionary of any size. In this case the time complexity is independent of the length of the dictionary words, and the number of entries in the dictionary.<>