Abstract
This paper investigates sentence-level text reuse in multilingual journalism, analyzing where reused content occurs within articles. We present a weakly supervised method for detecting sentence-level cross-lingual reuse without requiring full translations, designed to support automated pre-selection to reduce information overload for journalists (Holyst et al., 2024). The study compares English-language articles from the Slovenian Press Agency (STA) with reports from 15 foreign agencies (FA) in seven languages, using publication timestamps to retain the earliest likely foreign source for each reused sentence. We analyze 1,037 STA and 237,551 FA articles from two time windows (October 7-November 2, 2023; February 1-28, 2025) and identify 1,087 aligned sentence pairs after filtering to the earliest sources. Reuse occurs in 52% of STA articles and 1.6% of FA articles and is predominantly non-literal, involving paraphrase and compositional reuse from multiple sources. Reused content tends to appear in the middle and end of English articles, while leads are more often original, indicating that simple lexical matching overlooks substantial editorial reuse. Compared with prior work focused on monolingual overlap, we (i) detect reuse across languages without requiring full translation, (ii) use publication timing to identify likely sources, and (iii) analyze where reused material is situated within articles. Dataset and code: this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
本文研究了多语言新闻中的句子级文本复用现象，分析了复用内容在文章中的分布位置。我们提出了一种无需完整翻译的弱监督跨语言句子级复用检测方法，旨在支持自动化预筛选以减轻记者信息过载负担（Holyst等，2024）。研究将斯洛文尼亚通讯社（STA）的英文文章与15家外国机构（FA）的七种语言报道进行对比，通过发布时间戳保留每句复用内容最早可能的外文来源。我们分析了两时间段（2023年10月7日-11月2日；2025年2月1日-28日）内1,037篇STA文章和237,551篇FA文章，经筛选最早来源后识别出1,087组对齐句子对。复用现象出现在52%的STA文章和1.6%的FA文章中，且主要为非字面复用，涉及意译及多源组合复用。复用内容倾向于出现在英文文章的中后部，而导语部分更常为原创内容，表明简单词汇匹配会忽略大量编辑层面的复用行为。相较于以往聚焦单语重叠的研究，本文（i）无需完整翻译即可检测跨语言复用，（ii）利用发布时间定位可能来源，（iii）分析复用材料在文章中的具体位置。数据集与代码：此https链接。
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.29937
