Abstract
A method is presented for calculating a string B, belonging to a given regular language L, which is “nearest” (in number of edit operations) to a given input string α. B is viewed as a reasonable “correction” for the possibly erroneous string α, where α was originally intended to be a string of L. The calculation of B by the method presented requires time proportional to |α|, the number of characters in α. The method should find applications in information retrieval, artificial intelligence, and spelling correction systems.

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