title: Calculating a relative Levenshtein distance - make sense?
body: <p>I am using both Daitch-Mokotoff soundexing and Damerau-Levenshtein to find out if a user entry and a value in the application are "the same".</p>
  
  <p>Is Levenshtein distance supposed to be used as an absolute value? If I have a 20 letter word, a distance of 4 is not so bad. If the word has 4 letters...</p>
  
  <p>What I am now doing is taking the distance / length to get a distance that better reflects what percentage of the word has been changed.</p>
  
  <p>Is that a valid/proven approach? Or is it plain stupid?</p>