paragraph: Again, the fact that these two strings are very similar (differing by only one word) seems like useful evidence for deciding that they might be coreferent. Edit distance gives us a way to quantify both of these intuitions about string similarity. More formally, the minimum edit distance between two strings is defined as the minimum number of editing operations (operations like insertion, deletion, substitution) needed to transform one string into another.
answer: the minimum edit distance between two strings is defined as the minimum number of editing operations (operations like insertion, deletion, substitution) needed to transform one string into another.