My advisor in grad school had me implement a "typo distance" metric on strings once (how many single-key displacements for a typist using home row touch-typing to get from string A to string B), which seemed kind of cool. I never did find out what if anything she wanted to use it for.
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There's also Normalized Google Distance (a distance metric using the number of search results as a proxy), which can be used for text classification.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalized_Google_distance
My advisor in grad school had me implement a "typo distance" metric on strings once (how many single-key displacements for a typist using home row touch-typing to get from string A to string B), which seemed kind of cool. I never did find out what if anything she wanted to use it for.
Probably for spell checking! If you encounter an unknown word, you can rank candidate replacements by your advisor's metric.