The Taub Faculty of Computer Science Events and Talks

Edit distance is a measure of similarity of two strings based on the minimum number of character insertions, deletions, and substitutions required to transform one string into the other. The edit distance can be computed exactly using a dynamic programming algorithm that runs in quadratic time. Andoni, Krauthgamer and Onak (2010) gave a nearly linear time algorithm that approximates edit distance within approximation factor poly(log n). In this talk, I'll present a recent result in which we provide an algorithm whose running time is O(n^ {2−2/7} ) that approximates the edit distance within a constant factor. Joint work with Diptarka Chakraborty, Debarati Das , Michal Koucký and Michael Saks.