Automatic detection and visualisation of overlap for tracking of information flow

The detection of redundant or reused passages in texts is an important basis for various tasks including tracking of information flow, plagiarism detection, origin detection, web search and information retrieval. Being able to track the evolution of a piece of information through different revisions or instances of documents can generally help to gain an impression of the document's background. In this paper we propose an efficient algorithm for detection of textual overlap between documents as well as a tool for its visualisation, created in the course of the Holinshed Project at the University of Oxford. The Evaluation on an annotated corpus shows that the proposed algorithm performs better than state of the art approaches. -- Information flow ; information tracking ; overlap detection ; overlap visualisation ; string matching