Word similarity calculation by using the edit distance metrics with consonant normalization

Abstract

Edit distance metrics are widely used for many applications such as string comparison and spelling error corrections. Hamming distance is a metric for two equal length strings and Damerau-Levenshtein distance is a well-known metrics for making spelling corrections through string-to-string comparison. Previous distance metrics seems to be appropriate for alphabetic languages like English and European languages. However, the conventional edit distance criterion is not the best method for agglutinative languages like Korean. The reason is that two or more letter units make a Korean character, which is called as a syllable. This mechanism of syllable-based word construction in the Korean language causes an edit distance calculation to be inefficient. As such, we have explored a new edit distance method by using consonant normalization and the normalization factor.