text-matcher
A simple text reuse detection CLI tool. Given a pair of texts or directories of texts, it will find similar text between them. This is good for detection of text reuses such as citation, quotation, intertextuality, and plagiarism.
The pilot experiment that uses this tool is allusion-detection. A new project that uses this tool is middlemarch-critical-histories.
Demo
Does Milton quote from the Bible in his Areopagitica? Let’s find out.
$ text-matcher kjv.txt areopagitica.txt
1 total matches found.
match 1:
kjv.txt: (4135539, 4135561) Spirit. 5:20 Despise not prophesyings Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. 5:22 Abstain
areopagitica.txt: (25861, 25883) answerable to that of the Apostle to the Thessalonians PROVE ALL THINGS, HOLD FAST THAT WHICH IS GOOD. And he might
Usage
Just run text-matcher and provide the names of the text files you want to compare. You can also provide a directory of files instead of a single file, so if you want to compare textA.txt with every text file in textdir/, run text-matcher textA.txt textdir/.
You can also tweak the matching by providing the ngrams value to match against, and the threshold. From the help:
$ text-matcher --help
Usage: text-matcher [OPTIONS] TEXT1 TEXT2
This program finds similar text in two text files.
Options:
-t, --threshold INTEGER The shortest length of match to include in the
list of initial matches.
-c, --cutoff INTEGER The shortest length of match to include in the
final list of extended matches.
-n, --ngrams INTEGER The ngram n-value to match against.
-m, --mindistance INTEGER The minimum value for distance between two
match.
-l, --logfile TEXT The name of the log file to write to.
--stops Include stopwords in matching.
--verbose Enable verbose mode, giving more information.
--help Show this message and exit.
Installation
You can install text-matcher using pip:
pip3 install --user text-matcherOr globally, with sudo:
sudo pip3 install text-matcherAlternatively, clone this repo and install locally, using pip:
git clone https://github.com/JonathanReeve/text-matcher
cd text-matcher
pip install .
Or with Pipenv:
git clone https://github.com/JonathanReeve/text-matcher
cd text-matcher
pipenv install .
pipenv run text-matcher
Citation
If you use text-matcher in your research, you can cite it like this, for now:
@misc{Reeve2020,
author = {Reeve, Jonathan},
title = {Text-Matcher},
year = {2020},
publisher = {GitHub},
journal = {GitHub repository},
howpublished = {\url{https://github.com/JonathanReeve/text-matcher}},
commit = {988d9422a63165225ea136fc31427b1e57814505},
doi = {10.5281/zenodo.3937738}
}