Abstract: The edit distance between two strings is the minimum number of edit operations required to transform one into another.The edit distance is widely used in approximate string match,string similarity joins and etc.Dynamic programming algorithm(DPA) uses an edit distance matrix to compute the edit distance between two strings,which needs to compute all the elements in the matrix and has poor time efficiency.The progressive method changes the calculation orders of the elements to reduce the calculation numbers,which still needs to compute half of the elements and whose time efficiency needs to be improved.In our paper,we proposed a sequential verification algorithm to compute the edit distance based on the edit operation sequence.First,we analyzed the enumerable nature of edit operation sequence and gave a way to enumerate the sequences.Then,we got the result though sequentially verifying the edit operation sequences ordered by its edit operation numbers until the verification being successful.Experiments on approximate string search with threshold 2 show that compared with the DPA,our method achieves high performance.

Key words: Approximate string search,Edit distance,Sequential verification,Edit operation sequence