lingdist is a fast generalized edit distance and string
alignment computation mainly for linguistic aims. As a generalization to
the classic edit distance algorithms, the package allows users to define
custom cost for every symbol’s insertion, deletion, and substitution.
The package also allows character combinations in any length to be seen
as a single symbol which is very useful for International Phonetic
Alphabet (IPA) transcriptions with diacritics. In addition to edit
distance result, users can get detailed alignment information such as
all possible alignment scenarios between two strings which is useful for
testing, illustration or any further usage. Either the distance matrix
or its long table form can be obtained and tools to do such conversions
are provided. All functions in the package are implemented in
C++ and the distance matrix computation is parallelized
leveraging the RcppThread package.