Examine how Levenshtein distance affects the determination of the minimal edit distance between two strings. How is the minimal edit distance used in NLP systems for tasks like spell checking and correction?

Levenshtein distance, also known as the edit distance, measures the minimum number of single-character edits (insertions, deletions, or substitutions) required to transform one string into another. It plays a crucial role in various natural language processing (NLP) tasks, especially in tasks like spell checking and correction.