Enhanced Levenshtein Edit Distance Method functioning as a String-to-String Similarity Measure

Levenshtein is a Minimum Edit Distance method; it is usually used in spell checking applications for generatingcandidates. The method computes the number of the required edit operations to transform one string to another and it canrecognize three types of edit operations: deletion, insertion, and substitution of one letter. Damerau modified the Levenshteinmethod to consider another type of edit operations, the transposition of two adjacent letters, in addition to theconsidered three types. However, the modification suffers from the time complexity which was added to the original quadratictime complexity of the original method. In this paper, we proposed a modification for the original Levenshtein toconsider the same four types using very small number of matching operations which resulted in a shorter execution timeand a similarity measure is also achieved to exploit the resulted distance from any Edit Distance method for finding the amountof similarity between two given strings