Not quite sure if this is what you want, but the noisy channel model (call it "Bayesian" if you must) spell checker I linked to above is inspired by the classic

Not quite sure if this is what you want, but the noisy channel model (call it "Bayesian" if you must) spell checker I linked to above is inspired by the classic approach to speech recognition (and codebreaking, and machine translation, and natural language parsing). Norvig's algorithm essentially computes a censored form of Levenshtein distance. Dynamic programming algorithms for computing Levenshtein distance play a major role in gene sequencing, and also pop up in time series form as dynamic time warping.