Increasing recall for text re-use in historical documents to support research in the humanities

Abstract

High precision text re-use detection allows humanists to discover where and how particular authors are quoted (e.g., the different sections of Plato's work that come in and out of vogue). This paper reports on on-going work to provide the high recall text re-use detection that humanists often demand. Using an edition of one Greek work that marked quotations and paraphrases from the Homeric epics as our testbed, we were able to achieve a recall of at least 94% while maintaining a precision of 73%. This particular study is part of a larger effort to detect text re-use across 15 million words of Greek and 10 million words of Latin available or under development as openly licensed TEI XML. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.