title: Is there an edit distance algorithm that takes "chunk transposition" into account?
body: <p>I put "chunk transposition" in quotes because I don't know whether or what the technical term should be. Just knowing if there is a technical term for the process would be very helpful.</p>
  
  <p>The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edit_distance" rel="noreferrer">Wikipedia article on edit distance</a> gives some good background on the concept.</p>
  
  <p>By taking "chunk transposition" into account, I mean that</p>
  
  <pre><code>Turing, Alan.
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>should match </p>
  
  <pre><code>Alan Turing
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>more closely than it matches</p>
  
  <pre><code>Turing Machine
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I.e. the distance calculation should detect when substrings of the text have simply been moved within the text. This is not the case with the common Levenshtein distance formula.</p>
  
  <p>The strings will be a few hundred characters long at most -- they are author names or lists of author names which could be in a variety of formats. I'm not doing DNA sequencing (though I suspect people that do will know a bit about this subject).</p>