METER: MEasuring TExt Reuse

In this paper we present results from the METER (MEasuring TExt Reuse) project whose aim is to explore issues pertaining to text reuse and derivation, especially in the context of newspapers using newswire sources. Although the reuse of text by journalists has been studied in linguistics, we are not aware of any investigation using existing computational methods for this particular task. We investigate the classification of newspaper articles according to their degree of dependence upon, or derivation from, a newswire source using a simple 3-level scheme designed by journalists. Three approaches to measuring text similarity are considered: n-gram overlap, Greedy String Tiling, and sentence alignment. Measured against a manually annotated corpus of source and derived news text, we show that a combined classifier with features automatically selected performs best overall for the ternary classification achieving an average F1-measure score of 0.664 across all three categories.