Tom Wainstain


2025

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Versus: an automatic text comparison tool for the digital humanities
Motasem Alrahabi | Tom Wainstain
Proceedings of the First on Natural Language Processing and Language Models for Digital Humanities

Digital humanities (DH) have been exploring large-scale textual reuse for several decades: quotation, allusion, paraphrase, translation, rephrasing. Automatic comparison, made possible by the increasing digitization of corpora, opens new perspectives in philology and intertextual studies. This article presents a state of the art of existing methods (formal, vector-based, statistical, graph-based) and introduces an open-source tool, Versus, which combines multigranular vector alignment, interactive visualization, and critical traceability. This framework aims to provide a reproducible and accessible solution for DH researchers, with support for text comparison in multiple languages.