Quickly compare a string against a Collection in Java

Question

I am trying to calculate edit distances of a string against a collection to find the closest match. My current problem is that the collection is very large (about 25000 item

Answer 1

Levenshtein Automata allow for fast selection of a set of words from a large dictionary such that they are within the given Levenshtein distance from a given word.

See: Schulz K, Mihov S. (2002) Fast String Correction with Levenshtein-Automata.