Similarity-Based Support for Text Reuse in Technical Writing

Abstract

Technical writing in professional environments, such as user manual authoring for new products, is a task that relies heavily on reuse of content. Therefore, technical content is typically created following a strategy where modular units of text have references to each other. One of the main challenges faced by technical authors is to avoid duplicating existing content, as this adds unnecessary effort, generates undesirable inconsistencies, and dramatically increases maintenance and translation costs. However, there are few computational tools available to support this activity. This paper investigates the use of different similarity methods for the task of identification of reuse opportunities in technical writing. We evaluated our results using existing ground truth as well as feedback from technical authors. Finally, we also propose a tool that combines text similarity algorithms with interactive visualizations to aid authors in understanding differences in a collection of topics and identifying reuse opportunities.

Evaluación de distintas técnicas de representación de texto y medidas de distancia de texto usando KNN para clasificación de documentos

“…The bag of words is the data representation technique used in most of the consulted literature [13,6,14,15,1,16]. It consists on representing each text document as a vector of frequencies [13].…”

“…It consists on representing each text document as a vector of frequencies [13]. A variant of this representation uses Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) weighting [16,6] where each word in a document is assigned a weight depending on their frequencies within a specific document and throughout all the documents.…”

“…Statistical methods intend to create mathematical data representations of text without considering semantic nor linguistic properties and have shown very good results in the last 25 years in text mining areas [1]. Statistic methods include the representation of documents through bags of words and the use of distance metrics such as Cosine and Jaccard [3,6].…”

Automated classification of content components in technical communication

“…Large and complex documents used in technical communication are often composed of smaller building blocks called content components . This enables referenced reuse of components across and within different documents and cost‐efficient translation in cases where only a subset of a document is changed . Examples for these document types are not only any kind of technical information (manuals, reports, and educational material) but also standards documents, patents, and some specifications types.…”

“…1,2 and within different documents and cost-efficient translation in cases where only a subset of a document is changed. 4 Examples for these document types are not only any kind of technical information (manuals, reports, and educational material) but also standards documents, patents, and some specifications types. Content components can resemble, but are not limited to, subsections of a document and are, in most cases, conceptually self-contained.…”