A Method for Human-Interpretable Paraphrasticality Prediction

The detection of reused text is important in a wide range of disciplines. However, even as research in the field of plagiarism detection is constantly improving, heavily modified or paraphrased text is still challenging for current methodologies. For historical texts, these problems are even more severe, since text sources were often subject to stronger and more frequent modifications. Despite the need for tools to automate text criticism, e.g., tracing modifications in historical text, algorithmic support is still limited. While current techniques can tell if and how frequently a text has been modified, very little work has been done on determining the degree and kind of paraphrastic modification{---}despite such information being of substantial interest to scholars. We present a human-interpretable, feature-based method to measure paraphrastic modification. Evaluating our technique on three data sets, we find that our approach performs competitive to text similarity scores borrowed from machine translation evaluation, being much harder to interpret.