Technical writing in professional environments, such as user manual authoring for new products, is a task that relies heavily on reuse of content. 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. we have investigated the use of different similarity methods for the task of identification of reuse opportunities in technical writing. We also proposed 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.
A.J. Soto, A. Mohammad, A. Albert, A. Islam, E. Milios, M. Doyle, R. Minghim, M.C.F. de Oliveira. “Similarity-Based Support for Text Reuse in Technical Writing”. 15th ACM International Symposium on Document Engineering (DocEng). September 8-11, 2015; Lausanne, Switzerland