Researchers at Cornell University have tapped a pair of unlike sources — on-line journalism and computational biology — to make it possible to automatically paraphrase whole sentences. The researchers used gene comparison techniques to identify word patterns from different news sources that described the same event.
The method could eventually allow computers to more easily process natural language, produce paraphrases that could be used in machine translation, and help people who have trouble reading certain types of sentences.
Plagiarism
Given the lengths to which people will go to avoid having to do their own writing, I imagine that this tool, if widely available, would be quickly added to the repertoires of plagiarists. But then, I’m obsessed with plagiarism, so don’t mind me.
Re:Plagiarism
Well, I’d say, given the lengths to which people will go to avoid having to do their own writing, I imagine that this tool, if widely available, would be quickly added to the repertoires of plagiarists. But then, I’m obsessed with plagiarism, so don’t mind what I say.
Funny.. but *e does have a point
It could be used to plagarize, and the anti-plagarists will attempt to find a counter for it, which will increase the likelyhood of dinging innocent people – which is already happening. They’re taking small sections of a paper, and saying people cut-n-paste them. Sometimes there are very few ways to write something, and people independently come up with the same english words, in proper grammar to describe them. The anti-plagarists don’t want you to make up words, or be creative grammatically either. No-win situation.
They’re also archiving all papers, in an attempt to negate sharing papers via the internet.
In self-defense, students are going to have to start learning these techniques to check and see if what they thought up has been previously written. At some point every sentence on smaller more technical topics will be previously used. Increase the spread on each sentence, increase the archives of past work, etc, and this day comes closer.
The anti-plagarists need to give up testing by volume (write a 25 page paper), and go towards a more rigorous method of testing for understanding – with a component of writing/synthesis (ie: can a person who understands the topic communicate it, either by free-hand writing something, or synthesising existing sources).
— Ender, Duke_of_URL