Dana Fisman

Senior Academic

Asymptotic Hausdorff and Language Similarity

Dana Fisman, Gal Meirom

We introduce the Asymptotic Hausdorff lifting, denoted Aℍd, a general method for lifting an element-level metric d to a (pseudo-) metric on sets, that captures asymptotic similarity in infinite domains equipped with a notion of size. The construction is designed to be insensitive to finite deviations and to avoid the limitations of classical Hausdorff-based approaches, which are often overly sensitive to outliers and fail to reflect asymptotic behavior. Formal languages provide a central motivating instance of this framework, where elements are words and sets are languages. When applied to normalized edit distances, the Asymptotic Hausdorff lifting yields metric-valued distances between languages that reflect asymptotic edit behavior while preserving metric structure. We study the equivalence classes of regular languages induced by Aℍd for normalized edit distances d, and characterize their asymptotic essence. Focusing in particular on the normalized edit distance of Marzal and Vidal, ned, we investigate the computation of Aℍned for regular languages and for bounded context-free languages.

Publication language English
Publication status Published - 01.07.2026
Article Number 179

Keywords

Automata theory
Edit Distance
Language similarity
Metric Spaces
asymptotic Analysis
formal Languages

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Software