On the Weighted Mean of a Pair of Strings

String matching and string edit distance are fundamental concepts in structural pattern recognition. In this paper, the weighted mean of a pair of strings is introduced. Given two strings, x and y, where d(x, y) is the edit distance of x and y, the weighted mean of x and y is a string z that has edit distances d(x, z) and d(z, y)to x and y, respectively, such that d(x, z) _ d(z, y) = d(x, y). We’ll show formal properties of the weighted mean, describe a procedure for its computation, and give practical examples. Received: 26 October 2000, Received in revised form: 27 April 2001, Accepted: 20 July 2001