A Method For Suggesting Candidate Words As Replacements For An Input String Received At An Electronic Device

An electronic device for suggesting one or more candidate words from a list of words based on an input string received at said electronic device, the device comprising:

• a memory storing machine readable instructions;
• a processor configured to execute said machine readable instructions to implement the steps of the method
• a) providing an array in memory for receiving edit distance values between initial substrings of the input string and initial substrings of each word in a set of some or all of the words in the list of words;
• b) applying an edit distance algorithm comparing a selected word to a received input string in order to obtain the aforementioned edit distance values;
• and
• c) for one or more words of the set of words, determining a number of characters K by which it overlaps with a prefix of a previously considered word and retaining edit distance values in said memory array for said word being considered using some or all of the edit distance values for the K prefix characters of the previously considered word.

A non-transitory computer readable medium storing machine readable instructions executable by a processor of a server for implementing the steps of the method comprising:

• a) providing an array in memory for receiving edit distance values between initial substrings of the input string and initial substrings of each word in a set of some or all of the words in the list of words;
• b) applying an edit distance algorithm comparing a selected word to a received input string in order to obtain the aforementioned edit distance values;
• and
• c) for one or more words of the set of words, determining a number of characters K by which it overlaps with a prefix of a previously considered word and retaining edit distance values in said memory array for said word being considered using some or all of the edit distance values for the K prefix characters of the previously considered word.