How do I convert between a measure of similarity and a measure of difference (distance)?

Question

Is there a general way to convert between a measure of similarity and a measure of distance?

Consider a similarity measure like the number of 2-grams that two strings ha

Answer 1

Doing 1/similarity is not going to keep the properties of the distribution.

the best way is distance (a->b) = highest similarity - similarity (a->b). with highest similarity being the similarity with the biggest value. You hence flip your distribution. the highest similarity becomes 0 etc