Historical Text Re-use Detection: Behind the scene

Natural language and human communication rely upon text re-use, a term used to describe forms of referential content that include quotes or paraphrases. This material can be traced through computational analysis of the written text comprising the historical record. Given the idiosyncratic patterns of human text re-use as well as the different styles of citation and attribution throughout the centuries, any method of text re-use identification must account for the immense diversity of textual re-use strategies. Therefore, the topic of the lecture is not only an overview of the heterogeneity of text re-use and the challenges this poses for researchers, but an introduction to the technical methods of detection that will enable users to successfully perform an automatic analysis of text re-use that is sensitive to the wide variety of source text.