Question

I have an aplication which performs some basic morphological analysis, and I am looking for an efficient means to count the number of change operations needed to transform a word into another, character by character changes.

Thanks in advance people.

Answer 1

That sounds a lot like the Levenshtein Distance

The Levenshtein distance between two
strings is defined as the minimum
number of edits needed to transform
one string into the other, with the
allowable edit operations being
insertion, deletion, or substitution
of a single character

The article links to other comparison algorithms as well.