Computing the Expected Edit Distance from a String to a Probabilistic Finite-State Automaton

Abstract

In a number of fields, it is necessary to compare a witness string with a distribution. One possibility is to compute the probability of the string for that distribution. Another, giving a more global view, is to compute the expected edit distance from a string randomly drawn to the witness string. This number is often used to measure the performance of a prediction, the goal then being to return the median string, or the string with smallest expected distance. To be able to measure this, computing the distance between a hypothesis and that distribution is necessary. This paper proposes two solutions for computing this value, when the distribution is defined with a probabilistic finite state automaton. The first is exact but has a cost which can be exponential in the length of the input string, whereas the second is a fully polynomial-time randomized schema.