Is there an edit distance algorithm that takes “chunk transposition” into account?

Question

I put \"chunk transposition\" in quotes because I don\'t know whether or what the technical term should be. Just knowing if there is a technical term for the process would be ve

Answer 1

I'm not sure that what you really want is edit distance -- which works simply on strings of characters -- or semantic distance -- choosing the most appropriate or similar meaning. You might want to look at topics in information retrieval for ideas on how to distinguish which is the most appropriate matching term/phrase given a specific term or phrase. In a sense what you're doing is comparing very short documents rather than strings of characters.