paraphrasing words translation

Reach Your Professional Potential

Everyone has tons of work to get through. Some accept the frustration. Others choose Wordtune Generative AI to speed up their tasks.

Try Wordtune for free. No credit card required.

Trusted by professionals in leading companies

Do more, faster

Get to know Wordtune’s GenAI platform

Write with confidence

Perfect your writing with Wordtune Rewrite— from a single word to an entire page

Write like the professional you are with AI recommendations

Unleash your thoughts without worrying about grammar or spelling mistakes

AI writing assistant

Enhance your productivity.

Write faster with AI suggestions — while remaining true to your unique style

Personalize your writing further with statistical facts or even a joke

Say goodbye to endless iterations — gain full control of your GenAI creation process

Create with AI

Create from scratch with ai.

Streamline your work with a variety of templates personalized for you

Create quality content from scratch with the press of a button

Choose from emails, LinkedIn posts, creative headlines and more

Cut reading and watching time in half

Summarize YouTube videos, blog articles, PDFs and more

Consume only the parts you need to know

Save time while staying in the know

Gain full control of your information, docs and more

Create a personalized knowledge base on your own Wordtune library

Use your trusted sources to find the answers you need

Stay in the know with AI Q&A and semantic search

With you, anywhere you work

Whether you're on your desktop, mobile device or using your favorite apps, Wordtune is there for you.

Google Calendar

Microsoft word, chrome extension, google docs, wordtune for ios.

GenAI that’s empowering, not overpowering

Wordtune has become an essential copywriting assistant for my social media team. As a result, we have saved 70% of the time we would have spent brainstorming and editing captions.

Jonathan Kessler

Social Media Team Lead, Imagen

Wordtune speeds up our entire writing process by 15%. Additionally, it improves the quality of our messages and accurately captures the ‘melody’ of what we want to say in a more fluid language.

Barak Cohen

Learning & OD manager

Wordtune improved my customer satisfaction score (CSAT) by 30%. My goal in support operations is to translate technical language into clear and understandable English — Wordtune helps me achieve just that.

Tomer Ben-Arye

Support Operations Manager

Wordtune speeds up my writing process by 20% every day, saving me several hours of work. In my experience, Wordtune humanizes my content much better than any other AI tool.

Daniel Somers

Wordtune has reduced my email writing time by 30%. It’s a crucial tool for client-facing interactions and has allowed me to write at scale while maintaining the utmost quality.

Michal Livnat

Success Architect

The summarizing feature speeds up my research process by 25%, helping me discern which articles will be useful to read in full and which articles are irrelevant.

Ariel Sasson

Legal Data Team Leader, Attorney

Managers from our client-facing teams, such as product and support, reported that 80% of employees that use Wordtune found that it enhanced their communication.

Ortal Lozowick

Generative AI you can rely on

Wordtune doesn’t just give you options, it gives you facts . We check at least 5 sources before deeming a fact credible to use.

Wordtune in numbers

of professionals who trust Wordtune around the world

3.5B AI generations

used by Wordtune users per year

97% improved productivity*

*Users said in a survey after using Wordtune

companies have implemented Wordtune for their employees

Our Chrome extension rating

supported for smart translation into English

Stand out with Wordtune

Enterprise-level security for all

Wordtune takes privacy and security seriously. Securing your data and adhering to compliance is top of mind.

Unleash your true potential

Translation Techniques – Paraphrasing

A paraphrase is a restatement of the meaning of a text or passage using other words. The term itself is derived via Latin paraphrasis from Greek, meaning “additional manner of expression”. In the past, paraphrasing and translation were considered to be unconnected language processing tasks.

Things have changed and now we can consider paraphrasing a translation technique due to its utility in improving the structure and the message of the text.

No spam, we promise.

If we compare translation and paraphrasing, we observe that the first one represents the preservation of meaning when an idea is rendered in the words in a different language, whereas the latter is the preservation of meaning when an idea is expressed using different words in the same language. It is obvious that the two processes are related.

If we analyse, we can actually define translation as the art of paraphrasing a text from one language into another. As there is always more than one way to phrase a statement, then the result in the target text depends on the translator’s choice. Finding alternative ways to translate a phrase can be a very useful tool for a translator.

First of all, it can have positive effects on the style of the written piece, secondly it can avoid repetition of certain words and structures that is often problematic and it can also help shorten the text when the space requires doing so.

A paraphrase usually gives an explanation or a clarification of the text that is being paraphrases. It can be a useful technique for the reader as well, as it helps him easily understand the meaning of a certain phrase.

Depending on the translator’s choice, a paraphrase can make the text sound more natural, more ambiguous or more formal. It is a matter of imposed style in this case. An example of paraphrasing is:

“The signal was red” = “The train was not allowed to pass because the signal was red”.

We can observe here that besides expressing the same thing in a different way, paraphrasing actually gives an explanation. A paraphrase does not need to accompany a direct quotation; the paraphrase typically serves to put the source’s statement into perspective or to clarify the context in which it appeared. A paraphrase is typically more detailed than a summary. Paraphrasing usually aims at preserving the essential meaning of the material that is being translated and paraphrased. It means that the reinterpretation of a source that gives a different meaning to the original statement goes into the category of original research and not paraphrase.

The difference between a metaphrase and a paraphrase is that the first attempts to translate a text literally, whereas a paraphrase conveys the essential thought expressed in a source text even at the expense of literality. To conclude, paraphrasing can be considered a translation technique. It is proved that it is a useful tool for translators and writers and it helps improve the quality of the text. The reader benefits from this technique as well because it often clarifies the meaning of the text.

About " Chiara Grassilli " Has 118 Posts

Upcoming Translation Events – Summer 2017

Translation Techniques: Calque

Translation Techniques: Transposition

Translation Techniques: Modulation

One response to “translation techniques – paraphrasing”.

Thank you very much

Search in the blog

Affiliate disclosure.

This site contains affiliate links, which means that if you click on one of the product links, I’ll receive a small commission. This helps support the channel and allows me to continue to create content like this. Thank you for the support!

Blogging (2)
Financial Translation (4)
Freelancing (24)
Getting Started (31)
Interviews (13)
Language Learning (1)
Legal Translation (4)
Literary translation (3)
Localization (6)
Marketing Translation (14)
Medical Translation (1)
Project Managemet (2)
Real-life stories (2)
SEO translation (6)
Social Media Translation (4)
Subtitling (5)
Technical Translation (8)
Translation (90)
Translation Agency (1)
Translation Project Management (2)
Translation Techniques (27)
Web Translation (17)
Writing and Translation (7)

Original article
Open access
Published: 19 December 2018

Paraphrasing tools, language translation tools and plagiarism: an exploratory study

Felicity M. Prentice ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-4962-7413 1 &
Clare E. Kinden 1

International Journal for Educational Integrity volume 14 , Article number: 11 ( 2018 ) Cite this article

49k Accesses

32 Citations

67 Altmetric

Metrics details

In a recent unit of study in an undergraduate Health Sciences pathway course, we identified a set of essays which exhibited similarity of content but demonstrated the use of bizarre and unidiomatic language. One of the distinct features of the essays was the inclusion of unusual synonyms in place of expected standard medical terminology.

We suspected the use of online paraphrasing tools, but were also interested in investigating the possibility of the use of online language translation tools. In order to test the outputs of these tools, we used as a seed document a corpus of text which had been provided to the students as prompt for the essay. This document was put through six free online paraphrasing tools and six separate iterative language translations through the online Google Translate™ tool.

The results demonstrated that free online paraphrasing tools did not identify medical terminology as standardised or accepted nomenclature and substituted synonyms, whereas Google Translate™ largely preserved medical terminology.

We believe that textual indicators such as the absence of standard discipline-based terminology may be of assistance in the identification of machine paraphrased text.

Introduction

Imagine you are reading a student’s essay and are confronted with the following sentence:

A situation that can give resistance and additionally generally safe for botches, and that inspects choices without assaulting the pride and nobility of the individual influencing them, to will prompt better natural decisions.

In an assessment task set for first year undergraduate Health Science students in a pathway program, an alarming proportion of submitted work, nearly 10%, demonstrated linguistic contortions similar to the example given. This led us to consider the following questions:

Were students using online paraphrasing tools to manipulate work which was written in English and which had not been authored by them?

Were students who had English as an Additional Language (EAL) composing work in their first language and then translating this through online language translation tools?

Are there indicators which can identify the use of on-line paraphrasing tools?

All examples of unusual writing provided in this article are indicative of the nature of the student writing encountered but have been altered to retain anonymity while preserving the features of the linguistic anomalies.

While standards of English expression may vary considerably in work submitted by students, it is becoming more common to encounter essays which display standards of writing well below that which is expected of students studying in Higher Education. When the student is from an English as an Additional Language (EAL) background, poor expression in written work has been attributed to lack of facility with the language, clumsy patchwriting, or the use of an online translation tool, such as Google Translate™ (n.d.) ( https://translate.google.com.au ). Mundt and Groves ( 2016 ) contend that when students use an online translation tool to convert their own work from their first language into English this may be considered demonstrative of poor academic practice, as they are not actively developing English language skills. However, as the original work is the result of the student’s own intellectual merit, it is contentious as to whether this qualifies as academic misconduct. In the case of the submissions we received there was reasonable suspicion that the text had not been subject to a language translation tool but had been reengineered by an English-to-English paraphrasing tool. This called into question the source of the original English text, and suggested there was evidence of a genuine breach of academic integrity.

Rogerson and McCarthy ( 2017 ) reported that their initial awareness of paraphrasing tools was through a casual comment by a student. In our case, the serendipitous discovery of online paraphrasing tools was made when one of the authors was following an online forum discussing cheating methods. Prior to this revelation, our assumptions as to the origin of incomprehensible student writing had been more naïve, our explanations being focussed around patchwriting and LOTE-to-English translation tools. However, when encountering the extent of the use of inappropriate synonyms in essays submitted for this particular assessment task, we were moved to examine the text more closely. A review of one or two essays rapidly escalated to the identification of a cluster of essays which bore remarkable similarity in the use of peculiar language, and in particular the inclusion of bizarre synonyms for standard recognised terminology within the health sciences discipline. Further to this, there was significant similarity in the structure of the essays, where the information, and even in-text citations, were provided in an identical sequence. In some cases, the Turnitin® (n.d.) similarity index identified a match between a number of essays, but other suspicious works resulted in an index of 0%. It became clear that paraphrasing tools were probably being used and that students were colluding to paraphrase each other’s essays.

The literature is replete with the lamentations of academics who feel that pursuing academic misconduct forces them in to the role of detective. Collecting evidence, analysing scenarios, motives and prior offences and operating in a quasi-judicial, if not criminological paradigm, does not sit well within the cultural norms of academia (Brimble and Stevenson-Clarke 2006 ; Burke and Sanney 2018 ; Coren 2011 ; Keith-Spiegel et al. 1998 ; Sutherland-Smith 2005 : Thomas and De Bruin 2012 ). Our experiences seemed to resonate so clearly with this sentiment to the point where we felt a profound urge to recreate a television crime show, with essays taped to the wall connected by string, surrounded by tacked-up maps and photographs of the suspects.

The breakthrough came when an essay was so alarmingly absurd that we were able to trace the origin to another student’s essay. The assessment task was to analyse and discuss a scenario regarding a young Indigenous man’s experiences in the Australian Health Care System.

One student included in their essay a description of a Computerised Axial Tomography (CAT) scan which had been plagiarised from a Wikipedia page. However, in transcribing how images were taken from various angles, they had misspelled the word ‘angles’ as ‘angels’. This spelling error had not caused concern, however work submitted by another student provided evidence that there was a curious literary connection between the essays. In this case the second student reported that the CAT Scan images were taken from various ‘Blessed Messengers’.

It was apparent that the second student had used a paraphrasing tool to ‘spin’, that is, to apply synonym substitution, to the essay obtained from their colleague.

Given the poor standard of the output, why would a student resort to using paraphrasing tools? Paraphrasing is a complex and demanding task, requiring students to demonstrate not only understanding of the meaning and purpose of the text, but also to find the linguistic facility to restate this meaning in new and original words, and specifically in the discourse of Academic English (Shi 2006 ).This task is difficult enough when performed in a first language, and the challenge is magnified when the student is from a non-English speaking background (Bretag 2007 ; Carroll 2015 ; Correa 2011 ; Handa and Power 2005 ; Marshall and Garry 2006 ).

Bretag ( 2007 ) describes two aspects of the acquisition of a second language. Basic interpersonal communication skills can be developed in approximately two years, however it is estimated to take five to ten years to develop cognitive academic linguistic proficiency which is necessary to function in an academic learning environment. Patchwriting is when students attempt to paraphrase a source by substituting synonyms in passages while retaining too closely the voice of the original writer (Jamieson 2015 ). This may be classified as an intermediary stage of the development of academic linguistic proficiency representing a form of non-prototypical plagiarism (Pecorari 2003 ). As such, it may not be a deliberate or intentional breach of academic conduct. In students with EAL, the acquisition of the linguistic facility to represent the meaning of a text without resorting to reproducing the author’s actual words may take more than the few months that our students have been studying at an English-speaking University. However, in the cases under consideration, students did not attempt to manually re-engineer text in order to paraphrase but used an online paraphrasing tool to alter the entire corpus of the text. The original source text could be identified in many cases by a recognition of some structural features, for example, the reproduction of the scenario provided to the students.

Original One day, while Doug was out walking, he felt lightheaded and then lost consciousness and fell to the ground. He was brought to the Emergency Department of a major hospital by ambulance for assessment and investigation.

Post paraphrasing tool While one day on his walk Doug he felt bleary eyed and lost awareness and fell onto the ground. He was conveyed to the Emergency Department of the healing facility for significant appraisals and tests.

In some cases the original source was taken from the internet, notably Wikipedia, but in one instance the student lifted and paraphrased text taken directly from a file sharing site. The student did not provide an in-text citation, however the original source was identified by the student including the file sharing website address in the reference list. This has been referred to as illicit paraphrasing (Curtis and Vardanega 2016 ), and actions such as this may call into question the level of intentionality to deceive. The inclusion of a reference, albeit from an inappropriate source, may suggest the student was attempting to participate in the expectations of academic practice. Less generously, it may be assumed that copying material directly from a file sharing site, using a paraphrasing tool to deceive Turnitin® (n.d.) , and then submitting the work, even with a hopeful inclusion in the reference list, demonstrated an intentional breach of academic integrity.

Patchwriting

Strategic word substitution has always been a feature of students’ attempts at paraphrasing, which Howard defined as patchwriting,

Copying from a source text and then deleting some words, altering grammatical structures, or plugging in one synonym for another. (Howard 1999 , p.xvii, in Jamieson 2015 )

While patchwriting by students has been characterised as poor academic practice, it is also seen as a preliminary effort to become familiar with the discourse of academic writing (Pecorari 2003 ).

In the essays considered in this exploratory study, we encountered examples of English expression which indicated that the EAL student was struggling to develop fluency, for example:

Doug leaves his home and move far away from his family to the city. There he have house with an unknown people and he have feeling of loneliness and unhappy. He is not able to get the job and had very small income. He was usually sad and feel bad in himself. It is all these factors lead to a poor health.

We were also able to recognise patchwriting in text that had been appropriated from multiple sources, and these incidents were usually identified by Turnitin® (n.d.) and exemplified by a ‘rainbow’ of colours in the similarity report demonstrating different sources. However, in the essays under investigation the text demonstrated the inclusion of synonyms resulting in writing which was largely unintelligible. Further to this, there had been no manipulation of the syntax of the sentences, which heightened the unidiomatic nature of the writing. Whereas in patchwriting synonyms are manually substituted by the student, online paraphrasing tools achieve this through an automatic function, and thus the question arises, as posited by Rogerson and McCarthy ( 2017 ), as to whether the use of online paraphrasing tools transcends patchwriting to become what Walker describes as illicit paraphrasing (in Pecorari 2003 , p.9).

Expected medical terminology

One of the most obvious issues we encountered in the essays was the use of synonyms for standard medical terminology. Standardised nomenclature and terminology are employed throughout health care to avoid ambiguity in documentation and communication. This provides the interface for meaningful and appropriate communication of medical, nursing and allied health information regarding patient care, and is an essential element of safety and standardisation in care (Pearson and Aromataris 2009 ). In addition, this terminology is used for medical information classification, and has been raised as a priority area in the introduction of electronic health records to ensure interoperability across systems and health disciplines (Monsen et al. 2010 ). The importance of employing correct and predictable terminology has been identified as paramount in avoiding adverse outcomes:

Current research indicates that ineffective communication among health care professionals is one of the leading causes of medical errors and patient harm. (Dingley et al. 2008 , p.1)

Therefore, the acquisition and correct contextual application of medical terminology is a fundamental part of learning in health sciences. Students are exposed to this terminology throughout their studies, and in the case of the assessment task under scrutiny, students were provided a scenario, or enquiry prompt, which included the standard discipline-based terminology (see Appendix ). The lack of standard medical terminology and the inclusion of unusual synonyms for this terminology was a significant feature of the essays. In the event that students were exhibiting difficulties with English expression, or were manually substituting synonyms as seen in patchwriting, it would be expected that the standard terminology would be preserved. This led us to suspect, and subsequently investigate, online paraphrasing tools.

Paraphrasing tools

Spinning is a technique used to produce a new document, or documents, from an original text source by replacing words in such a way as to retain the overall meaning of the text, while avoiding machine-based text matching tools used to identify plagiarism. Machine based paraphrasing tools were developed to enable text spinning as a way of improving website rankings in Google search results and are part of a suite of search engine optimisation (SEO) techniques referred to as Black-Hat marketing. (Lancaster and Clarke 2009 ; Rogerson and McCarthy 2017 ; Zhang et al. 2014 ).

In web-based marketing the goal is to get the highest ranked place in a Google search index.

The Google search engine identifies and calculates the frequency of links between, and website traffic to, each website and ranks sites on the search results accordingly. In Black Hat marketing, the aim is to create sites including blogs, articles and webpages which provide multiple links to the target page, thus ensuring optimisation of the search engine results and a higher overall ranking (Bailey 2018 ).

Google search engines use word matching software which can recognise duplicate text and penalties are applied where this has been detected, hence the need to create paraphrasing tools which will instantly produce duplicate text material which cannot be detected. These paraphrasing tools were designed to hoodwink word matching software but were not intended to emulate human generated text. It is apparent that students are now using these tools to spin text from numerous original sources with the aim to deceive word matching software such as Turnitin® (n.d.) .

The free online automated paraphrasing tools rely principally on synonym substitution without altering the overall syntax of the sentence, resulting in language which is unidiomatic at best, incomprehensible at worst.

When Rogerson & McCarthy published in 2017, they reported that a simple Google search for paraphrasing tools resulted in over 550,000 hits. Our search in 2018 demonstrated a proliferation of paraphrasing sites resulting in over 3,320,000 hits. Cursory examination revealed that many are duplicate sites with the same tool offered under different names. Of greater concern is the increased juxtaposition of advertisements and links to essay purchasing services. Anticipating the vulnerability of the student, some sites offer a free paraphrasing tool but ensure the output is extremely poor.

For example, when the following sentence taken from the assessment scenario:

One day, while Doug was out walking, he felt lightheaded and then lost consciousness and fell to the ground. He was brought to the Emergency Department of a major hospital by ambulance for assessment and investigation.

is entered into a free online paraphrasing tool the following results were obtained:

Brace girl, stretch Doug was at large peripatetic, he felt lightheaded and fit lost consciousness and fell to the ground. He was debasement to the Danger Diversify of a chief sanatorium by ambulance for weight and criticism. Plagiarisma http://plagiarisma.net/spinner.php

One sidereal day, while Doug was out walk, he felt lightheaded and then lost knowingness and downslope to the pulverization. He was brought to the Emergency Department of a major hospital by ambulance for assessment and probe. Rephraser https://www.rephraser.net/instant-paraphrasing-tool/

This word salad is used to entice students into contract cheating, that is, outsourcing the assessment task to be completed by a third party (Lancaster and Clarke 2006 ). The sites provide a link to an essay writing service, in one case with a curiously poorly worded advertisement stating:

Aren’t satisfied with the results? But what to expect from the tool? Hire an expert for a quality rewording! Only $8.39/page. Paraphrasing Online https://www.paraphrasingonline.com

Paraphrasing tools work by creating an intermediate text referred to as “spintax”, where a number of synonyms are provided for each selected word, for example the phrase:

the junior doctor in the rehabilitation centre prepared a discharge summary

is transformed into the intermediary spintax:

the {understudy specialist | lesser specialist | lesser pro} in the {recovery fixate | recovery focus | rebuilding centre} prepared a {release rundown | release report | blueprint}.

Based on a number of parameters, words can be substituted at varying rates within a sentence, however it is non-deterministic. Therefore, for the purpose of Black Hat marketing, this provides a vast number of permutations for the creation of articles which are sufficiently different from each other to evade detection by word matching software (Bailey 2018 ). This explains why students using paraphrasing tools may generate apparently different essays from a single seed document.

To create the spintax, a bank of potentially alternative terms is held in a synonym dictionary, which may be local to the paraphrasing tool, or held in cloud storage (Shahid et al. 2017 ; Zhang et al. 2014 ). In their study, Zhang et al. ( 2014 ) were able to access this dictionary and reverse engineer two paraphrasing tools (Plagiarisma and The Best Spinner) to establish which words are subject to synonym substitution, referred to as ‘mutables’ , and which words do not appear in the synonym dictionary and thus would not be included in the spintax, referred to as ‘immutables’ . This approach, referred to as DSpin, relies on comparing the unchanged text, or immutables, located within the spun text to the original text (Zhang et al. 2014 ). The match of immutable terms between documents (spun and original) will provide evidence of the source of the text. We became interested in the concept of immutable words and how these may be used to identify documents that had been machine paraphrased.

The paraphrasing tools that require a fee-based subscription provide a large number of parameters to manipulate the output, including the contents of the dictionary, the maximum number of synonyms used and replacement frequency, and the replacement of both single words and short phrases (Shahid et al. 2017 ). In this study we assumed that the students were accessing the fee free version of online paraphrasing tools and as a result the output of spinning was less subject to control resulting in more words treated as mutables and thus less discretionary synonym substitution.

As medical terminology is fundamental to the discourse of health sciences, it would be reasonable to classify these words as preferentially immutable . However, the paraphrasing tools do not have the capacity to recognise the significance and importance of these terms, and thus they are within the synonym dictionary as mutables and subject to synonym substitution.

Students in this unit of study are exposed to medical terminology throughout the curriculum, and it is emphasised that these terms are fundamental to the discourse and required for communication in health sciences. Hyland ( 2006 ) notes that becoming a member of a discourse community involves “learning to use language in disciplinary approved ways” (p.38). They are expected to use these terms, and it is clear in the rubric and marking guides that the assessment is aligned to the objective of the acquisition of this specialised language. The scenario provided in this assessment was rich and replete with the terminology, and there was ample opportunity for imitation and reproduction of the writing style and nomenclature. Therefore, the absence of the recognised terminology and the inclusion of unidiomatic and contextually invalid synonyms was particularly obvious to the readers.

Method of analysis

Identifying the use of paraphrasing tools.

It could be argued that the use of synonyms, in particular archaic or unidiomatic words and phrases, is a clear indicator that machine generated paraphrasing has been used. For example, in the papers submitted by students where the use of paraphrasing tools was suspected, the term aboriginal man was substituted with autochthonic person , the hospital became the mending office , the rehabilitation centre the recovery fixate , and the discharge summary the release precis .

In order to investigate the extent to which paraphrasing tools substituted recognised and expected medical terms for unusual synonyms, we selected three essays which we had identified as particularly unusual. We did not know the provenance of these essays, although there was structural evidence that they might have arisen from a single seed document which was an essay submitted by one student in the current cohort.

Table 1 shows the variation from the expected nomenclature.

Comparing online language translation and paraphrasing tools

Prior to learning of the existence of online paraphrasing tools, we had assumed that students were authoring work in their first language, and then using online translation tools to convert the text to English. Perhaps the most notable and available online free translation tool, Google Translate™, was made available as an online tool in 2006 using a statistical machine translation engine to translate text from one language, via English, on to the target language. In 2016 Google implemented a Neural Machine Translation engine, which has provided a more sophisticated and accurate output (Le and Schuster 2016 ). Given the idiomatic nature of language, errors may still occur where a word is translated into a synonym which may not be contextually valid.

To investigate the possibility that students had used Google Translate™, the scenario provided as the enquiry-based learning prompt was used as a seed document to ascertain the changes which might occur when paraphrasing tools and Google Translate™ were employed. The scenario ( Appendix ) was put through a number of paraphrasing tools, and in each case the standard medical terminology was consistently changed. When the scenario was put through Google Translate™, the terminology was changed only rarely.

The scenario document was subject to iterative language translation (Day et al. 2016 ). The text was entered into Google Translate™ for translation to a language other than English, and this translation was copied and re-entered to a refreshed Google Translate™ page for translation back into English. The target languages used were Arabic, Punjabi, Hindi, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional) and Vietnamese. The languages were chosen as they represent the principal first languages of the EAL students enrolled in this subject.

The translations were of a generally good quality, displaying minor errors in tense and pronoun gender, but could be easily comprehended. The most accurate translations were Chinese (Simplified and Traditional) and Vietnamese, and the highest number of errors occurred in Arabic, Hindi and Punjabi. In the latter languages there were more substitutions for standardised health terms (Table 2 ).

The original scenario was then put through six paraphrasing tools selected as the top entries generated by a Google search using the term ‘paraphrasing tools’ . This technique follows that used by Rogerson and McCarthy ( 2017 ) based on the assumption that students would use a similar search strategy and select the sites listed at the top of the search results (Table 3 ).

It was not known whether these sites were using the same paraphrasing tool, however, given the multiple outputs available through non-discriminatory synonym substitution, there was ample opportunity for a diverse output.

The results from the output texts were analysed for synonym substitution of recognised and expected medical terminology, and this was compared to the outputs from the iterative language translation through Google Translate™. This technique was used for convenience purposes as the intention was to gain an overall impression of the extent to which medical terms were substituted by paraphrasing tools compared to Google Translate™. As can be seen from Table 4 , the proportion of substituted terms was significantly different. From the 21 standard medical terms there were 73 synonyms from the paraphrasing tools and 7 alternative terms from Google Translate™. Blank spaces in the table indicate that no alterative term was generated by Google Translate™.

Although it is not within the scope of this brief exploratory study to state that there is a measurable difference in synonym substitution between paraphrasing tools and Google Translate™, the above results give a general indication of the observable differences.

When determining whether there is a potential breach in academic integrity, it is important to distinguish between extremely poor English skills, the use of a LOTE-to-English translation device, and the generation of text through a paraphrasing tool. Carter and Inkpen ( 2012 , p.49) note “Machine translated text often seems to be intuitively identifiable by proficient speakers of a language”. If a student has used paraphrasing tools to alter a text to evade detection of plagiarism, then that act of evasion suggests that plagiarism has occurred. Word matching software such as Turnitin® (n.d.) has proven valuable in identifying replication of text from other sources. However, the very purpose of paraphrasing tools is to deceive software developed to detect plagiarism, and it is apparent that to date this strategy has been successful (Lancaster and Clarke 2009 ; Rogerson and McCarthy 2017 ; Shahid et al. 2017 ). Consequently, the burden of detection remains with the human reader who has to become increasing adept at spotting stylistic variations and any other flags relating to mechanisms that have been used to avoid detection (Gillam et al. 2010 ).

The method of detection we suggest, identifying the absence of expected nomenclature such as discipline based terminology, could be considered an extrinsic analysis of the text. The expected immutables of recognised medical terms are substituted with synonyms, and thus treated by the paraphrasing tools as mutables . The paraphrased text is compared to an ideal or external text, that is, the text containing the medical terminology which was expected by the assessor. Shahid et al. ( 2017 ) propose a method of intrinsic analysis of paraphrased text through stylometric analysis:

We observe that style, language, grammatical constructs, and certain linguistic expressions in spun documents deviate from a human author because spinning software introduce artefacts in their output which are specific to a text spinner. (p. 5)

The technique described in their study involves the application of a number of algorithms to a selected text which can lead to identification of the source text. This level of analysis is not currently available to academic staff seeking to identify plagiarism committed through the use of paraphrasing tools. However, Turnitin® (n.d.) is developing an Authorship Investigation tool which will use stylometric and forensic linguistic analysis to provide measurement parameters indicative of authorship of a text ( https://www.turnitin.com/solutions/authorship-investigation ,). Where there is suspicion that contract cheating has occurred, the Authorship Investigation tool will use examples of previous work submitted by a student to ascertain similarity of stylistic features to the work under suspicion. The premise is that a stylometric ‘fingerprint’ of the student’s literary style and expression can be used for comparison to submissions which may have been outsourced to another author. It is anticipated that this tool will be of potentially useful in determining whether a submission has hallmarks which distinguish it from other pieces of writing by the student, but it will not be possible to identify the author of the outsourced work.

In this exploratory study we identified linguistic features of spun text which indicated the use of paraphrasing tools. However, we were reliant on the curious case of the blessed messengers to point towards collusion. This was achieved through close collaboration by the marking staff, and until techniques for reverse engineering of paraphrased text become more widely available, “What ultimately leads to determinations of plagiarism is considerable manual analysis and subjective judgement” (Bretag and Mahmud 2009 , p.54).

Students, and in particular those from an EAL background, experience significant challenges in conforming to academic conventions such as paraphrasing. The availability of free online paraphrasing tools may appear to them as a realistic solution to these challenges despite the word salad which is created by these tools. Whereas EAL students who write original work in their first language and then use online translation tools to convert this to English may be demonstrating poor academic practice, it can be argued that the submitted work is a result of their own intellectual endeavours. Unfortunately, students who use paraphrasing tools to spin text from undisclosed sources, thus evading word matching software, have committed an overt act of academic dishonesty.

In academic writing in the health science discipline, there is an expectation that standard medical terminology will be used. We noted that absence of this in the students’ submissions and investigated the outputs of both paraphrasing tools and Google Translate™. We noted that paraphrasing tools are significantly more likely to substitute inappropriate synonyms for accepted medical nomenclature, whereas Google Translate™ largely preserved these terms intact.

When paraphrasing tools have been applied to text the output is frequently of such poor quality as to render the text unintelligible. We also noted the following features: the language generated will be notable for the use of unidiomatic words and phrases; expected vocabulary such as standard medical terminology will usually be substituted with inappropriate synonyms; word matching software, such as Turnitin® (n.d.) , may not recognise the re-engineered text from the source and thus provide a low similarity index which may not be indicative of the actual level of plagiarism.

When using online translation tools, such as Google Translate™, to convert text from a language other than English to English, there is less likelihood that discipline specific nomenclature, such as standard medical terminology, will be changed to the same extent as paraphrasing tools.

This study demonstrates that there are a number of distinct features which can be identified in the text generated by paraphrasing tools. Awareness of these features will assist in the process of detecting plagiarism. While the emphasis should be on supporting students to develop the skills required to paraphrase appropriately, identifying linguistic markers which provide evidence of the use of paraphrasing tools will be of benefit in the overall management of breaches of academic integrity.

Abbreviations

Computerised Axial Tomography Scan

English as an Additional Language

Emergency Department

Language other than English

Bailey J (2018) A brief history of article spinning. March 8, 2018 Plagiarism Today. https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2018/03/08/a-brief-history-of-article-spinning/ . Accessed 15 Aug 2018

Bretag T (2007) The emperor's new clothes: yes, there is a link between English language competence and academic standards. People Place 15(1):13

Google Scholar

Bretag T, Mahmud S (2009) A model for determining student plagiarism: electronic detection and academic judgement. J Univ Teach Learn Pract 6(1):49–60

Brimble M, Stevenson-Clarke P (2006) Managing academic dishonesty in Australian universities: implications for teaching, learning and scholarship. Account Account Perform 12(1):32–63

Burke D, Sanney K (2018) Applying the fraud triangle to higher education: ethical implications. J Leg Stud Educ 35(1):5–43

Article Google Scholar

Carroll J (2015) Making decisions on management of plagiarism cases where there is a deliberate attempt to cheat. In: Bretag T (ed) Handbook of academic integrity. Springer, Singapore, pp 567–622

Carter D, Inkpen D (2012) Searching for poor quality machine translated text: learning the difference between human writing and machine translations. In: Canadian conference on artificial intelligence. Springer, Heidelberg, pp 49–60

Coren A (2011) Turning a blind eye: faculty who ignore student cheating. J Acad Ethics 9(4):291–305

Correa M (2011) Academic dishonesty in the second language classroom: instructors’ perspectives. Mod J Lang Teach Methods 1(1):65–79

Curtis GJ, Vardanega L (2016) Is plagiarism changing over time? A 10-year time-lag study with three points of measurement. High Educ Res Dev 35(6):1167–1179

Day S, Williams H, Shelton J, Dozier G (2016) Towards the development of a Cyber Analysis & Advisement Tool (CAAT) for mitigating de-anonymization attacks. Paper presented at the 27th modern artificial intelligence and cognitive science conference, Dayton, Ohio, USA, April 22–23, 2016.

Dingley C, Daugherty K, Derieg MK, Persing R (2008) Improving patient safety through provider communication strategy enhancements. In: Advances in Patient Safety: New Directions and Alternative Approaches, vol 3. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, USA

Gillam L, Marinuzzi J, Ioannou P (2010) Turnitoff-defeating plagiarism detection systems. Subject Centre for Information and Computer Sciences . Available via http://epubs.surrey.ac.uk/790662/2/HEA-ICS_turnitoff.pdf . Accessed 16 Sept 2018

Google Translate™ (n.d.) https://translate.google.com.au . Accessed 16 Aug 2018

Handa N, Power C (2005) Land and discover! A case study investigating the cultural context of plagiarism. J Univ Teach Learn Pract 2(3):8

Hyland K (2006) English for academic purposes. An advanced resource book. Routledge, London

Howard RM (1999) Standing in the shadow of giants: Plagiarists, authors, collaborators (No. 2). Greenwood Publishing Group.

Jamieson S (2015) Is it plagiarism or patchwriting? Toward a nuanced definition. In: Bretag T (ed) Handbook of academic integrity. Springer, Singapore

Keith-Spiegel P, Tabachnick B, Whitley B, Washburn J (1998) Why professors ignore cheating: opinions of a national sample of psychology instructors. Ethics Behav 8(3):215–227

Lancaster T, Clarke R (2006) Eliminating the successor to plagiarism? Identifying the usage of contract cheating sites. In: Proceedings of 2nd international plagiarism conference

Lancaster T, Clarke R (2009) Automated essay spinning–an initial investigation, Paper presented at the 10th annual conference of the subject Centre for Information and Computer Sciences

Le Q, Schuster M (2016) A neural network for machine translation, at production scale. Google AI Blog. Available via https://ai.googleblog.com/2016/09/a-neural-network-for-machine.html

Marshall S, Garry M (2006) NESB and ESB students’ attitudes and perceptions of plagiarism. Int J Educ Integr 2(1):26–37

Monsen K, Honey M, Wilson S (2010) Meaningful use of a standardized terminology to support the electronic health record in New Zealand. Appl Clin Inform 1(4):368

Mundt K, Groves M (2016) A double-edged sword: the merits and the policy implications of Google translate™ in higher education. Eur J High Educ 6(4):387–401

Paraphrasing Online (n.d.) https://www.paraphrasingonline.com . Accessed 14 Aug 2018

Paraphrasing Tool (n.d.) https://paraphrasing-tool.com . Accessed 14 Aug 2018

Pearson A, Aromataris E (2009) Patient safety in primary healthcare: a review of the literature. Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care, Adelaide

Pecorari D (2003) Good and original: plagiarism and patchwriting in academic second-language writing. J Second Lang Writ 12(4):317–345

Plagiarisma (n.d.) http://plagiarisma.net/spinner.php . Accessed 14 Aug 2018

PrePostSEO (n.d.) https://www.prepostseo.com/free-online-paraphrasing-tool . Accessed 14 Aug 2018

Rewriter Tools (n.d.) https://www.rewritertools.com/paraphrasing-tool . Accessed 14 Aug 2018

Rogerson AM, McCarthy G (2017) Using internet based paraphrasing tools: original work, patchwriting or facilitated plagiarism? Int J Educ Integr 13(1):2

SEOMagnifier (n.d.) https://seomagnifier.com/online-paraphrasing-tool Accessed 14 Aug 2018

Shahid U, Farooqi S, Ahmad R, Shafiq Z, Srinivasan P, Zaffar F (2017) Accurate Detection of Automatically Spun Content via Stylometric Analysis. In: Data Mining (ICDM), 2017 IEEE International Conference. IEEE, New Orleans

Shi L (2006) Cultural backgrounds and textual appropriation. Lang Aware 15(4):264–282

Sutherland-Smith W (2005) Pandora’s box: academic perceptions of student plagiarism in writing. J Engl Acad Purp 4(1):83–95

Thomas A, De Bruin G (2012) Student academic dishonesty: what do academics think and do, and what are the barriers to action? Afr J Bus Ethics 6(1):13–24

Turnitin® (n.d.), Introducing Authorship Investigation. https://www.turnitin.com/solutions/authorship-investigation . Accessed 21 Sept 2018

Zhang Q, Wang DY, Voelker GM (2014) DSpin: detecting automatically spun content on the web. NDSS https://doi.org/10.14722/ndss.2014.23004

Download references

No funding was sought or provided for this study.

Availability of data and materials

No data or materials outside of those presented in the manuscript are held by the authors.

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

La Trobe College Australia, Sylvia Walton Building, Bundoora, VIC, 3086, Australia

Felicity M. Prentice & Clare E. Kinden

You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Contributions

FP 80%. CK 20%. Both authors have read and approved the final manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Felicity M. Prentice .

Ethics declarations

Authors’ information.

Not applicable

Competing interests

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Publisher’s Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Scenario for assessment task

Doug is a nineteen year old aboriginal man who has had Type I Diabetes Mellitus since he was 13. Doug was born in a small town in a remote area of Victoria. Despite not completing Year 8, he decided to move away from his family to the city. He has not been able to get a job and has very little income. He misses his family, friends and community, but is determined that they not find out that he is unhappy. Doug has a history of homelessness but has been living for the past 2 weeks in a share house with people he doesn’t know well. Doug does not see the same doctor for his diabetes , he visits many different clinics , depending on where he is living at the time.

As a consequence of the fall, he sustained a head injury which resulted in severe and persistent headaches, loss of coordination and difficulty with walking. In the Emergency Department (ED) a number of tests were undertaken (including a CAT scan , blood sugar test and full examination). It was identified that prior to the fall he had experienced an episode of ‘ insulin shock ’.

Following an 8 h stay in the Emergency department , Doug was transferred to the Neurology ward for assessment and monitoring. In addition to the medical records available in the central electronic filing system, a member of the ED team provided a ‘ handover ’ to the Nurse Unit Manager of the Neurology Ward .

It was when he was on this ward that the nursing staff identified that Doug has limited knowledge of his diabetes including where to access support and advice, and how to monitor his glucose levels and adjust his insulin dose properly. A team consisting of nurses , the ward physiotherapist , a social worker , and a neurologist met on three occasions to discuss Doug’s case. They used the information from the Emergency Department admission , the assessments undertaken by the team of health professionals , and included Doug in all their decisions. They identified his issue with Diabetes management, but as this was a short admission to the Neurology Ward , they did not have the resources to follow this up. After a 4 day stay in the Neurology ward , the healthcare team decided that Doug would benefit from being transferred to a rehabilitation centre . A junior doctor who had just joined the ward was given the task of writing the discharge summary .

Doug was taken by patient transport to a rehabilitation centre which was not part of the acute hospital , but an independently run organisation. The brief discharge summary was sent with Doug describing the initial head injury and noting the need for ongoing therapy to assist his co-ordination and walking. While in the rehabilitation centre , Doug was assessed by the physiotherapist , occupational therapist , doctor , and of course the nursing staff who monitored Doug daily. They did not seek any additional information from the acute hospital , only using the discharge summary as a basis for Doug’s care. They did not formally meet, but they each wrote notes in Doug’s medical record .

On day six of his admission to the rehab centre , the Nurse Unit Manager observed Doug confidently walking in the ward corridor by himself. As a very experienced Rehab Nurse she decided that Doug could be discharged home based on his ability to independently toilet and ambulate. In addition, she was under considerable pressure by the senior management of the Rehab Centre to discharge patients to free up beds. Without consulting the other staff, the Nurse Unit Manager informed Doug that he was to be discharged the following day as he now appeared fine and had no consequences from his “little bump on the head.”

Doug was discharged the next day and returned to the house he was sharing. None of his housemates had even realised he had been away. Five days following his discharge home, Doug was again admitted to the ED by ambulance, having suffered a fall at home while trying to descend the stairs from the second floor where his bedroom was located. He fractured his left tibia as a result of the fall. He told the ED staff that he had not been eating well, but that he had still injected his usual insulin dose just prior to the fall.

(Bold and italics provided by authors to highlight standard medical terminology).

Rights and permissions

Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article.

Prentice, F.M., Kinden, C.E. Paraphrasing tools, language translation tools and plagiarism: an exploratory study. Int J Educ Integr 14 , 11 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40979-018-0036-7

Download citation

Received : 28 September 2018

Accepted : 15 November 2018

Published : 19 December 2018

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s40979-018-0036-7

Share this article

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

Online language translation
Medical terminology

International Journal for Educational Integrity

ISSN: 1833-2595

Submission enquiries: Access here and click Contact Us
General enquiries: [email protected]

Wrong password

Existing subscribers, prior to 24th of february, please use your usercode as password and scroll down to 'settings' to update your password.

Pricing Login

Home Examples Tutorials

Simplify text or Generate Multi-lingual Multi-document Summaries

Username Password Sign in Create account Pricing
Basic English
Artificial Intelligence
Short stories
Advanced topics
Advanced Services

Change your password

Available files

You don't have any saved files.

Please wait, we will send you an email when the summary is ready

Add more documents

You have 5000 words!

Refrence document 1

To much files to translate

Please select checkbox to Summarize, if you want to only simplify a text you only select a unique file.

To change password

Grammar check ready, spelling check ready, choose an option.

File to be processed :

Original and final text

Final text only

Color coded

Second level foot notes

Basic English vocabulary (850 words)

International vocabulary (50 words)

Scientific vocabulary (100 words)

Commercial vocabulary (100 words)

Philosophy vocabulary (100 words)

Legal vocabulary (100 words)

You exceeded the limit of permitted transactions!

Limit reached . For account type .

Please send and email to [email protected] to ask for more transactions!

You were exceeded the limit of permitted words per summary!

Limit reached .

Listo tu simplificacion

Please correct the punctuation here!

PRO account cannot translate text over different languages.

This text is . If you want to simplify text using different languages please Sign up to Premium or Platinum account

Please fill the data required

Please insert relevance.

Important: remember to use more than 1 document, separated by two horizontal spaces. See instructions here

Relevance: indicates the point at which a sentence is not considered relevant to the topic at hand. (higher numbers make the summary longer)

Too much files to translate

Too much files to translate, please select only one file.!

In order to upload more than one file, you need to upload your account to Platinium.!

Summary in process

Please wait, we will send you an email when the summary is ready.

Unable to make a summary

we are sorry for this problem, we will have some smart monkeys working hard to solve this problem.

We detect text in language different from English

If you want to make a summary from other languages please Sign up to Premium or Platinum

Please, add more documents

Your text contains . Translation estimated time is . Language to be translated

Original and translated text

Translated text only

Basic English vocabulary

International vocabulary

Scientific vocabulary

Commercial vocabulary

Philosophy vocabulary

Legal vocabulary

Translation limit reached !

You have reached the limit of daily translation.

You can obtain more online translations as well as various new possibilities by signing up to a Pro , Premium or Platinum account.

Language different from English !

We detect that this text is in . To translate different languages to Basic English please go to signup

You can obtain more online translations as well as various new possibilities by signing up to a Premium or Platinum account.

limit reached !

You have reached the limit of daily online summaries.

You can obtain more online summaries as well as various new possibilities by signing up to a Platinum account.

Language not supported!

Language is not supported, please try with other language.

Simplification is achieved by paraphrasing the original text using a working vocabulary of 1,000 words based on C.K. Ogden's Basic English, and explaining in footnotes, using this basic vocabulary, more complex words (currently, a 35,000-word advanced dictionay is employed). Making sense of text having a reduced vocabulary, with complex words explained in footnotes, is much easier than reading the original full-vocabulary version in many cases; even if translation into other languages is done for those whose mother tongue is not English. Premium and Platinum subscribers are able to generate reduced-vocabulary texts from any source language available on Google translate.

This approach is also ideal as a pre-processing step in Big Data, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, and we have found it so useful in these applications that we have now made the service available to the general public. This approach allows for infinite expressiveness using a FIXED finite vocabulary. Other methods of rewording or paraphrasing text typically change only those words or phrases they have a ready replacement for but leave many words untouched, so that the final vocabulary is unpredictable. Our system replaces ALL words so the final text uses this 1,000 words vocabulary.

Our summaries use abduction, do not require any prior training or ontologies, are produced on the basis of semantic relevance and do NOT use word-frequency at all, which is not a reliable method since important material might not be mentioned often enough and could be missed by conventional methods. By using our legal, scientific and business dictionaries, even complex material can be summarized successfully. Note that if there is a number of sentences having substantially the same meaning (subject to an equivalence measure provided by the user), our summarizing technology only displays one of these; thereby making for a much more powerful summaries than can be achieved by conventional methods.

Our method involves simplification followed by generating an ideogram (graphical pictures or symbols that represent an idea or concept) for each sentence, generating a volume of interest around the sequence produced by the first document, and including in the summary any sentences from other documents that fall within this volume; i.e. offer added knowledge and are relevant. Platinum subscribers are able to use multiple languages both for multi-document summaries and also for simplification.

Take a free trial

You can try it for free! After checking the spelling and using the grammar checker, you can easily simplify text online, summarize and generate content. All of this for free 5 times a day with a limit of 5000 words per process. If you are happy with it, you can subscribe and have full access to the service and apersonal dictionary. If you need to process foreign languages, please subscribe to the Premium or Platinum service.

CHOOSE YOUR OPTIONS Vocabulary: Basic/International Scientific Commercial Philosophy Legal The specialized vocabulary in these dictionaries is fully explained in footnotes using the Basic vocabulary.

Enter your reference document as the first text followed by all your other documents in any Google language (only Platinum subscribers) You can process all the contents of your choice and obtain an automatic multi-document multi-language summary. Choose the required level of relevance (summary size) and equivalence (level at which two sentences are taken to be equivalent).

Simplish can improve reading, learning, and teaching by rewording difficult English, for faster comprehension. It helps teachers produce engaging lessons using a fixed reduced vocabulary every student understands, and thereby help improve learning outcomes. In fact, Basic English grammar is not different from that of standard English, it simply takes in only a part that can later be expanded bit by bit as the student becomes more fluent.

Summarize and/or Simplify your own files and have your own personal dictionary

Upload 10 Mb maximum file size (.txt, .pdf, .doc)
5,000 maximum words per file
Personal dictionary
20 daily online conversions
20 daily file simplification uploads
5 daily online summaries
E-mail & Skype support
Upload 50 Mb maximum file size (.txt, .pdf, .doc)
25,000 maximum words per file
Unlimited online conversions
Unlimited daily file uploads
Google Translation API (50,000 words per month)
50,000 maximum words per file
Simplify & Summarize your files
Google Translation API (100,000 words per month)

Interesting bits of news we have recently posted

Find out the benefits of using Simplish for Analytics

Often the pre-processing step is the hardest and choosing the vocabulary is a big part of that. Simplish has a scientific/technology/legal dictionary with more than 30,000 words explained using the 1,000 Basic words. Moreover, subscribers can add words to their own personal dictionaries so files are reduced to the specific vocabulary size the user needs.

How was the Basic English vocabulary chosen? Are they really "Basic" words in any language? How about in Chinese? Does that help Chinese people learn English?

We are working on a full display of the Basic vocabulary in Chinese so we can explore one way this vocabulary could be adequately updated in the near future. A high definition version is available on Displate:

www.displate.com

Are you looking for reading material in Basic English?

You will find famous texts and readings converted into basic English here:

Do you need to interact with people whose mother

tongue is not English?

What are the advantages of using Simplish?

If you need to generate business, technical, marketing, legal material or even make your site easier for an international audience and be sure the recipient has understood what you are writing, reducing the size of the vocabulary used in the text is a reliable way of making it more easily understood. The system is not perfect and the resulting text might need to be edited, particularly because of brand names for example, but you will quickly find that the improved readability shows through in less confusion, fewer queries/objections and more business.

The Sounds and Sound Patterns of Language

Phonetics: the physical manifestation of language in sound waves...

/Learn-basic-english

If you need to simplify/paraphrase text, do multi-lingual multi-document summaries or just read complex scientific/legal/business material, it will probably be easier to understand it after being changed into Basic English. Complex words are described in footnotes; thus avoiding looking them up in a normal dictionary that will likely contain a few other words the reader will in turn need to look up!

If you need more summaries or simplifiying capacity, upgrade to one of our subscription plans

The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism (1923)

This work has been used as a textbook in many fields including linguistics, philosophy, language, cognitive science and most recently semantics and semiotics in general. The chief idea probably is that Words and Things are connected “through their occurrence together with things, their linkage with them in a ‘context’ that Symbols come to play that important part in our life [even] the source of all our power over the external world”.

In this context system, the authors develop a 3-part semiotics—symbol, thought and referent with three relations between them. Symbols are then "those signs which men use to communicate one with another and as instruments of thought, occupy a peculiar place... All discursive symbolization involves... weaving together of contexts into higher contexts... So, for a word to be understood requires that it form a context with further experiences”...

(available during US EST office hours, but you can try anytime...)

User not found

Sample Original:

Sample output:.

Rewordify.com

Understand what you read.

Rewordify is a feature in Read&Write for Google Chrome , a literacy support tool that helps learners to improve their reading and comprehension.

Rewordify.com is powerful, free, online software that improves reading, learning, and teaching. This site can:

Intelligently simplify difficult English , for faster comprehension
Effectively teach words , for building a better vocabulary
Help teachers save time and produce engaging lessons
Help improve learning outcomes

Rewordify.com's amazing features have helped millions of people read billions of words more easily.

The site is free and child-safe . Use it now; there's no software to install. Try the online demo and the first-time user guide . Teachers: You can print free, full-color literature to get started. Scroll down for more info...

Read smarter now.

Rewordify.com simplifies difficult English. Enter hard sentences (or whole chapters) into the yellow box at the top of the page. (You can also enter a web site URL.) Click Rewordify text and you'll instantly see an easier version, for fast understanding. The reworded words are highlighted— click them to hear and learn the original harder word. You can change how the highlighting works to match the way you learn!

Do you dislike dictionaries because they're confusing and unhelpful? You'll love Rewordify.com's clear, easy-to-understand definitions—they change to match the original word or phrase's part of speech, verb tense, and singular/plural form, so they make sense. Our amazing Rewordifying Engine is what makes it all possible, and no other web site has it.

Want to see something now? Click Classic Literature at the top and start reading—easier.

Read better tomorrow.

Learn more words faster. Our exclusive Learning Sessions actively teach you words so you learn them . Any time you paste in a block of text, our software finds all the hard words, lets you pick which ones you want to learn, and then teaches them to you in a Learning Session.

A Learning Session isn't an online quiz: it's an effective, step by step process where you hear words and phrases, type them, and read them. The software re-teaches you exactly what you need when you need it, and moves ahead when you're ready. When you've learned a word, the site stops "rewording" it, so the site grows with you as you learn! Learn more about Learning Sessions .

Learn your way.

Learn the way you want—from what you want to read. You can change the way the site works to fit your learning style as you read and learn from almost any text passage or web page. See the different highlighting styles in the box? You can pick any of them, and lots more options. Click the Settings link (at the bottom of the page now, or at the top of any page) to see all the choices you have. (The demo text in the box here never changes.)

Now you can easily get your students involved in their learning: let them select the text that interests them. Let them print and complete the activities with which they're most comfortable. Imagine each student learning vocabulary customized to his or her interests, while you have time to teach instead of typing. Could differentiation by interest or readiness be any easier? You can start doing it today, for free .

Teach more, type less.

You never have to type another vocabulary list or quiz again.

Type (or copy-paste) in any block of text in the yellow box at the top of this page, click Rewordify text , and click the Print/Learning activities button. Here's how . You (or your students!) can select from a rich variety of quizzes and learning activities, with or without answer keys.

Do you need to teach (or not teach) particular vocabulary words and phrases? Rewordify.com gives you the exact control you need for specialized vocabulary instruction. You can make customized word lists so the site rewords and teaches any word or phrase exactly the way you want.

Build a learning library.

Save all your documents online so anyone can read them and learn from them at any time.

Just log in, rewordify something, and click the Share button.

Select how public or private you want the document, enter the title, author, etc., and you're done!

You get a link that you can put in your online lesson plans, teacher web pages, or blog. No more rewordifying the same thing over and over again!

You can view, manage and edit all your documents from any computer. Just log in (or create a free, safe account) and start building your learning library. Here's how to do it .

Improve learning outcomes.

At Educator Central , you can create and manage student accounts, monitor your students' learning, and get detailed reading and learning analytics that help you make smart classroom decisions. For free. Now.

(In a hurry? Log in. Click Educator Central at the top.)

In a few minutes, you can create student accounts on Rewordify.com, and easily monitor your students' reading and learning progress. Get actionable learning and error analytics as your students read and learn from any document you post, or from any document or web page they want to read.

Imagine each student learning different words based on his or her interest or ability level. It's easy to do: Rewordify.com designs and teaches individualized vocabulary lessons with our highly effective Learning Sessions , so you have the time to teach students the important stuff: how to learn, how to break through obstacles, how to believe the words "I can do it."

As your students read and learn, get detailed charts and reports that tell you what you need to know—by student, by class, or for all your classes.

Effectively match interventions with students, based on detailed error breakdowns that let you see what you need to see in a few clicks.

Student accounts are anonymous, and they keep your students safe and focused on learning.

Start using it now: Log in and click on Educator Central at the top. Read more about Educator Central.

It's free, fast, and safe.

Rewordify.com is free online software. You're using it now. There's nothing to buy or install. It works on any computer, tablet, or smartphone. Just point your browser to Rewordify.com and start reading and learning. Yes, it's tablet-friendly—no mouse needed. Yes, your whole school district can create teacher and student accounts, without entering any personal information . When? Now.

Can it get better? Yup. The site shows no ads, for a distraction-free, school-safe learning environment.

It's fast. Wasting your (and your students' time) is bad. That's why Rewordify.com was designed from the ground up to be lightning-fast and use very little data. The site doesn't have a hundred images of puppies and kittens and a hundred links to a hundred lists. What it does have is speed and ease of use, which are very nice when you have to teach a room full of teenagers. Or adults.

It's an app. Want the app? You're using it. Wasn't that easy? The site is a web app, which is great for you, because you get almost-daily site updates automatically —so you can read and learn, not download and install app updates.

We keep kids safe online. Rewordify.com requires no personal information . Student accounts are completely anonymous and cannot post or share anything. Read more about how we protect children's privacy .

Rewordify.com can display simplified versions of web pages. Our state-of-the-art web filtering technology blocks millions of inappropriate sites and questionable language, to protect kids online and keep them reading only what they should be reading. Read more about how we protect children from inappropriate material .

Features & benefits

Get started now.

Here's what to do next:

First, do the demo. You'll be an expert in five minutes: Click here for the demo.

Learn the site, step by step. Our First-Time User Guide clearly shows you how to get started.

Teachers: Learn about Educator Central and all it can do to help improve student learning outcomes. Also, you can print lots of free, full-color literature to help you get started in the classroom.

Have some fun. Are you up for a vocabulary challenge? Play Rewordo. Be aware: it's not easy.

Browse some classics. Want to be more sure of Shakespeare, or brush up on Bronte? Scroll to the top, and click the Classic Literature link. It's a fast way to get started using the site. Or, use the Search bar at the top. Try entering the word raven to understand the deal with Poe, that black bird, and the "Nevermore" thing.

Check out the goodies. You can install our One-Click Learning browser applet that lets you rewordify most web pages in one click. Our cool (and free, of course) School Clock tells you the current time and date, what class period you're currently in, countdowns to the next period, and more. You can customize it for any school's schedule, and make as many different School Clocks as you have different day schedules. Use it now .

Show the love! Please tell us about mistakes the site makes when "rewording" and defining words. That feedback is the single most valuable thing you can do to help the site (and learners around the world). Click here to contact us. Do you want to help defray the site's operating costs, and read a great thriller at the same time? You can! Get your copy of Electric Dawn .

Site summary: Rewordify.com helps with reading comprehension and vocabulary development by simplifying English to a lower reading level. It lets you reword a sentence or reword a paragraph. It will simplify English by reducing text complexity. It's a dictionary alternative that will improve comprehension and teach vocabulary. It's an important part of reading instruction and vocabulary instruction for ESL students, people with reading disabilities, people with a learning disability, or anyone who wants to improve reading skill.

35650 / 8.2

Your browser does not support the audio element

Downloads of 1,929 LitCharts Lit Guides.
Teacher Editions for every Lit Guide.
Explanations and citation info for 40,694 quotes across 1929 books.
PDFs explaining 136 Literary Terms.

Every Shakespeare play, poem, and sonnet alongside a modern English translation everyone can understand.

AI language translation startup DeepL nabs $300M on a $2B valuation to focus on B2B growth

More funding is being poured into startups focused on AI. DeepL , which builds automated text translation and writing tools that compete against the likes of Google Translate and Grammarly, said on Wednesday that it has raised an additional $300 million. It is now valued at $2 billion, post-money.

This round, led by Index Ventures, underscores the frenetic interest that investors have in AI startups at the moment and how companies are capitalizing on that opportunity while they can. DeepL, which is still not profitable, was valued at $1 billion in January 2023 , when it raised just over $100 million.

The new money will be used to drive more sales and marketing, as well as further research and development.

The company, based in Cologne, Germany, said it has more than 100,000 businesses and organizations using its tools. Given that this is just a tiny percentage of the company’s addressable market, the aim is to try to scale that significantly.

CEO and founder Jarek Kutylowski told TechCrunch in an interview earlier this month that the company has largely grown organically so far, and it was looking to ramp up sales and marketing efforts to add more customers and expand what it does with those it already has.

That highlights a key issue for AI companies targeting other businesses: Although many executives are pressing their teams to come up with strategies for how AI can be used in their organizations, many projects have failed to progress beyond the pilot or small deployment phase. Ramping that up will be of prime importance to AI tech vendors.

“Inbound is great, but we want to develop a stronger relationship with our customers,” he said. “We’re working hard on developing a better outbound function, because inbound is only going to get you so far. At some point, you have to start solving the problems together with your customers. The company’s transforming quite a bit into this enterprise direction, which is complicated and interesting for a research based company.”

Kutylowski said that about 60% of the company’s staff are technologists at the moment, and it will be hiring more non-technical personnel going forward. Indeed, balancing that with a focus on research will be one of DeepL’s big challenges.

The startup supports 32 different languages at the moment, and it has been expanding its product portfolio steadily. The latest addition to the list is one very much focused on enterprises: DeepL Write Pro is described as “a writing assistant specifically tailored for business.” Customers signing up for DeepL’s tools include Zendesk, Nikkei, Coursera and Deutsche Bahn, it said.

“Companies want to have control over how their employees speak, right?” Kutylowski said.

However, DeepL faces potentially strong competition from a wide swath of companies: Some specialize in the same area, and platform companies like Google, Amazon and Microsoft already have operations in areas like translation and are looking to enhance them further with AI.

Some of the newer, foundational AI companies like OpenAI or Anthropic have not made headway into the same space as DeepL yet, but there is an obvious opportunity for them, too. Some of these companies might not be focusing on translation and writing improvements right now, but making AI feel more seamless and “human” will continue to be a priority, so DeepL cannot rest on what it claims to be its leading position today.

ICONIQ Growth, Teachers’ Venture Growth, and previous backers IVP, Atomico and WiL also participated in the round.

“DeepL’s runaway success is a bit of an ‘open secret’ in the business community,” said Danny Rimer of Index Ventures in a statement. “The company is exceptionally thoughtful about creating cutting-edge AI products that deliver real and immediate value to their customers.”

More TechCrunch

Get the industry’s biggest tech news, techcrunch daily news.

Every weekday and Sunday, you can get the best of TechCrunch’s coverage.

Startups Weekly

Startups are the core of TechCrunch, so get our best coverage delivered weekly.

TechCrunch Fintech

The latest Fintech news and analysis, delivered every Sunday.

TechCrunch Mobility

TechCrunch Mobility is your destination for transportation news and insight.

Meta’s new AI council is comprised entirely of white men

Meanwhile, women and people of color are disproportionately impacted by irresponsible AI.

Garry Tan has revealed his ‘secret sauce’ for getting into Y Combinator

If you’ve ever wanted to apply to Y Combinator, here’s some inside scoop on how the iconic accelerator goes about choosing companies.

India’s BluSmart is testing its ride-hailing service in Dubai

Indian ride-hailing startup BluSmart has started operating in Dubai, TechCrunch has exclusively learned and confirmed with its executive. The move to Dubai, which has been rumored for months, could help…

FCC proposes all AI-generated content in political ads must be disclosed

Under the envisioned framework, both candidate and issue ads would be required to include an on-air and filed disclosure that AI-generated content was used.

Refer a founder to Startup Battlefield 200 at Disrupt 2024

Want to make a founder’s day, week, month, and possibly career? Refer them to Startup Battlefield 200 at Disrupt 2024! Applications close June 10 at 11:59 p.m. PT. TechCrunch’s Startup…

Bluesky now has DMs

Social networking startup and X competitor Bluesky is officially launching DMs (direct messages), the company announced on Wednesday. Later, Bluesky plans to “fully support end-to-end encrypted messaging down the line,”…

Peter Thiel-founded Valar Ventures raised a $300 million fund, half the size of its last one

The perception in Silicon Valley is that every investor would love to be in business with Peter Thiel. But the venture capital fundraising environment has become so difficult that even…

Spyware found on US hotel check-in computers

Several hotel check-in computers are running a remote access app, which is leaking screenshots of guest information to the internet.

Techstars CEO Maëlle Gavet is out

Gavet has had a rocky tenure at Techstars and her leadership was the subject of much controversy.

Connected fitness is adrift post-pandemic

The struggle isn’t universal, however.

A comprehensive list of 2024 tech layoffs

The tech layoff wave is still going strong in 2024. Following significant workforce reductions in 2022 and 2023, this year has already seen 60,000 job cuts across 254 companies, according to independent layoffs tracker Layoffs.fyi. Companies like Tesla, Amazon, Google, TikTok, Snap and Microsoft have conducted sizable layoffs in the first months of 2024. Smaller-sized…

HoundDog.ai helps developers prevent personal information from leaking

HoundDog actually looks at the code a developer is writing, using both traditional pattern matching and large language models to find potential issues.

Google Pay will now display card perks, BNPL options and more

The changes are designed to enhance the consumer experience of using Google Pay and make it a more competitive option against other payment methods.

Vinod Khosla is coming to Disrupt to discuss how AI might change the future

Few figures in the tech industry have earned the storied reputation of Vinod Khosla, founder and partner at Khosla Ventures. For over 40 years, he has been at the center…

Truecaller partners with Microsoft to let its AI respond to calls in your own voice

AI has already started replacing voice agents’ jobs. Now, companies are exploring ways to replace the existing computer-generated voice models with synthetic versions of human voices. Truecaller, the widely known…

Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses now let you share images directly to your Instagram Story

Meta is updating its Ray-Ban smart glasses with new hands-free functionality, the company announced on Wednesday. Most notably, users can now share an image from their smart glasses directly to…

Why Spotify is launching its own font, Spotify Mix

Spotify launched its own font, the company announced on Wednesday. The music streaming service hopes that its new typeface, “Spotify Mix,” will help Spotify distinguish its own unique visual identity. …

Hydrolix seeks to make storing log data faster and cheaper

In 2008, Marty Kagan, who’d previously worked at Cisco and Akamai, co-founded Cedexis, a (now-Cisco-owned) firm developing observability tech for content delivery networks. Fellow Cisco veteran Hasan Alayli joined Kagan…

Bolster, creator of the CheckPhish phishing tracker, raises $14M led by Microsoft’s M12

A dodgy email containing a link that looks “legit” but is actually malicious remains one of the most dangerous, yet successful, tricks in a cybercriminal’s handbook. Now, an AI startup…

Boeing, NASA indefinitely delay crewed Starliner launch

If you’ve been looking forward to seeing Boeing’s Starliner capsule carry two astronauts to the International Space Station for the first time, you’ll have to wait a bit longer. The…

TikTok turns to generative AI to boost its ads business

TikTok is the latest tech company to incorporate generative AI into its ads business, as the company announced on Tuesday that it’s launching a new “TikTok Symphony” AI suite for…

Space VC closes $20M Fund II to back frontier tech founders from day zero

Gone are the days when space and defense were considered fundamentally antithetical to venture investment. Now, the country’s largest venture capital firms are throwing larger portions of their money behind…

Patronus AI is off to a magical start as LLM governance tool gains traction

These days every company is trying to figure out if their large language models are compliant with whichever rules they deem important, and with legal or regulatory requirements. If you’re…

Linktree surpasses 50M users, rolls out its social commerce program to more creators

Link-in-bio startup Linktree has crossed 50 million users and is rolling out the beta of its social commerce program.

Immigrant banking platform Majority secures $20M following 3x revenue growth

For a $5.99 per month, immigrants have a bank account and debit card with fee-free international money transfers and discounted international calling.

Unify helps developers find the best LLM for the job

When developers have a particular job that AI can solve, it’s not typically as simple as just pointing an LLM at the data. There are other considerations such as cost,…

Aerodome is sending drones to the scene of the crime

Response time is Aerodome’s immediate value prop for potential clients.

Granola debuts an AI notepad for meetings

Granola takes a more collaborative approach to working with AI.

DeepL, which builds automated text translation and writing tools, has raised a $300 million round led by Index Ventures.

AI language translation startup DeepL nabs $300M on a $2B valuation to focus on B2B growth

Book News & Features

A german novel about a tortured love affair wins 2024 international booker prize.

Andrew Limbong

Author Jenny Erpenbeck's novel Kairos was named this year's winner of the International Booker Prize. Thomas Lohnes/Getty Images hide caption

Author Jenny Erpenbeck's novel Kairos was named this year's winner of the International Booker Prize.

Kairos , a novel about a love affair between a younger woman and older man in 1980s Germany, has won this year's International Booker Prize. The award is one of the most prestigious prizes for fiction translated into English.

The book, originally written in German by Jenny Erpenbeck, was translated by Michael Hofmann. The two will receive a prize of 50,000 British pounds (about $63,000), split evenly.

International Booker Prize shortlist for 2024 spans three continents

Book Reviews

Pain and pleasure do the tango in the engrossing new novel 'kairos'.

At the center of Kairos is a relationship between 19-year-old Katherina, and Hans, a married writer in his 50s. They have sex, they go on walks, they listen to music. But the relationship soon starts to turn violent and cruel. This feeling of loss and disillusionment maps onto the political shifts happening in Germany at the time. In praising the novel, Fresh Air critic John Powers writes that "Erpenbeck understands that great love stories must be about more than just love."

He continues: "Even as she chronicles Katharina's and Hans' romance in all its painful details, their love affair becomes something of a metaphor for East Germany, which began in hopes for a radiant future and ended up in pettiness, accusation, punishment and failure."

The cover to the novel Kairos, written by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated by Michael Hofmann

Erpenbeck was previously an opera director. Her first novel was 2008's The Old Child and The Book of Words about a child who loses her memory. In 2018, she was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize for her novel Go, Went, Gone . She's a hugely acclaimed writer earning glowing reviews and glossy profiles from NPR , The New York Times , and The New Yorker , with critics often predicting a Nobel Prize win in her future.

Translator Michael Hofmann is a poet, essayist, and a previous judge for the International Booker Prize. Hofmann is the first male translator to win the award. He's translated dozens of books from German to English, including authors such as Franz Kafka and Hans Fallada. A 2016 interview in The Guardian noted his ability to "single-handedly revive an author's reputation," calling him "arguably the world's most influential translator of German into English."

In a press release announcing the prize, Eleanor Watchel, chair of this year's judge, praised the way the novel used the personal story as a way of examining the broader political machinations of Germany. "The self-absorption of the lovers, their descent into a destructive vortex, remains connected to the larger history of East Germany during this period, often meeting history at odd angles."

The other finalists for the 2024 International Booker Prize were Not a River by Selva Almada, translated from Spanish by Annie McDermott; Crooked Plow by Itamar Viera Junior, translated from Portuguese by Johnny Lorenz; Mater 2-10 by Hwang Sok-yong, translated from Korean by Sora Kim-Russell and Youngjae Josephine Bae; What I'd Rather Not Think About by Jente Posthuma, translated from Dutch by Sarah Timmer Harvey; and The Details by la Genberg, translated from Swedish by Kira Josefsson.

Author Georgi Gospodinov and translator Angela Rodel won last year's International Booker Prize for the novel Time Shelter.

This story was edited for radio and digital by Meghan Collins Sullivan .

Free Al Office Suite with PDF Editor

Edit Word, Excel, and PPT for FREE.

Read, edit, and convert PDFs with the powerful PDF toolkit.

Microsoft-like interface, easy to use.

Windows • MacOS • Linux • iOS • Android

Create with AI

Best AI Assistant for Marketing in 2024

Marketing is a multifaceted discipline, involving research, strategic planning, and creative campaign execution, all demanding critical thinking skills. And with the advent of AI, marketing has evolved into a more extensive, refined, and advanced field. AI tools like AIPal have played a pivotal role in this transformation, offering invaluable assistance across various marketing domains.

I've personally witnessed the transformative power of AIPal in my marketing endeavors, and the results have been exceptional. Whether you're aiming to expand your business or execute targeted marketing campaigns, AIPal is your ultimate ally, providing comprehensive support every step of the way.

Overview of AIPal’s Key Features for Marketing

By harnessing the power of AIPal , you can streamline your marketing processes, boost productivity, and achieve remarkable outcomes. From assisting in market research and audience targeting to generating content ideas and analyzing data insights, AIPal streamlines the marketing process and empowers marketers with valuable tools for strategic decision-making.

With its capabilities in social media management, email marketing support, SEO guidance, and competitor analysis, AIPal provides a holistic approach to marketing optimization, helping businesses drive engagement, conversion, and growth in today's competitive landscape.

Furthermore, AIPal facilitates personalized customer interactions through natural language processing, enabling marketers to nurture leads, provide exceptional customer support, and build lasting relationships. By leveraging AIPal's diverse functionalities, marketers can streamline workflows, optimize campaigns, and stay ahead of the curve in achieving their marketing objectives.

Also, AIPal offers a range of other features for you to make the most out of:

Chat: Engage in conversations with AI models such as GPT-3.5, GPT-4, Claude, or Gemini. It also allows for setting up role-playing chats for various scenarios.

Write: Utilize AI for writing tasks, including content generation, rewriting, and crafting responses to emails or social media comments.

Read: Summarize web pages and extract key ideas, making information easier to comprehend and analyze.

Translate: Access real-time parallel translation services with side-by-side comparison, breaking down language barriers and facilitating communication across languages.

Grammar: Benefit from auto spell check and paraphrasing features, ensuring that your text is error-free and articulated clearly.

How to Get Your AI Assistant for Marketing - AIPal

AIPal is available for download on the Chrome Web Store, just like countless other Chrome extensions. Let's go through the process of downloading and getting started with the AIPal Assistant for Marketing.

Step 1: To begin, open Google Chrome on your system and visit the AIPal Chrome Extension page .

Step 2: Next, click on the "Add to Chrome" button to begin downloading.

Step 3: A confirmation window will appear in Chrome asking if you want to install the extension. Click "Add Extension" to proceed.

Step 4: Upon download completion, AIPal will automatically integrate with your Chrome extensions. For your convenience, consider pinning AIPal to Chrome using the dedicated "Pin" icon for easier access.

Step 5: AIPal is now accessible alongside your other pinned extensions in the Chrome toolbar.

Step 6: Upon continuing your web browsing in Chrome, a discreet AI assistant will be available on the right side of the screen, prepared to offer assistance.

How to use AIPal for Marketing

Digital marketing is a vast field which includes copywriting, ad copies, email marketing, content writing, and more. Now, imagine a single AI chatbot integrated within Chrome, assisting you in all these tasks! AIPal, lightweight yet equipped with AI powered by GPT-4 and Claude 3, helps you in every aspect of digital marketing. Content creators can rely on it to create content at scale, generate outlines, overcome writer's block, or craft attractive taglines for articles.

AIPal can assist you in writing threads on platforms like X or informative posts on LinkedIn, or simply reply to emails. In simple terms, with ChatGPT-4 and Claude 3 clipped onto your Google Chrome, you have automation and effective use of current AI technology at its peak. Let's explore some key areas where I've been saving time in my digital marketing agency using AIPal.

Using AIPal for Content Creation

AIPal can be utilized to create articles, ad copies, and perform copywriting directly within Chrome. If you're looking to conduct research while crafting your article, AIPal, with the assistance of Chrome and top AI models, has you covered in these domains.

My typical journey of writing an article begins with creating an outline, which is often incomplete without competitor analysis and proper research on the topic I'm delivering to my audience.

Step 1: To conduct thorough research for my article, I start by summoning AIPal. Simply click on the AIPal icon in the Chrome extension bar.

Step 2: Now, I need to perform competitor analysis. To do this, click on the "Read" tab and paste the URL of your competitor's article. AIPal will digest the information, which can be used later.

Step 3: Once AIPal understands the information I require, I ask AIPal to help gather further information that might be useful for the audience. To do this, click on "Chat on" to chat with AIPal.

Step 5: Now simply chat with AIPal and ask follow-up questions accordingly. This will help you gather more data on your desired topic.

Step 5: Once all the necessary information has been acquired, the next step is to ask AIPal to generate a unique outline for an article on the preferred topic.

Step 6: With this outline, we can then ask AIPal to create an article using the gathered information.

This is just one of the ways I've discovered to leverage AIPal to my advantage. By utilizing this methodology, digital marketers can harness AIPal for more effective copywriting to sell their products or generate compelling titles to capture readers' attention for their blogs.

Use Word, Excel, and PPT for FREE, No Ads.

Edit PDF files with the powerful PDF toolkit.

Microsoft-like interface. Easy to learn. 100% Compatibility.

Boost your productivity with WPS's abundant free Word, Excel, PPT, and CV templates.

AIPal for Marketing Materials

There are other ways to use AIPal for marketing, such as asking AIPal to compose an article or post, or seeking assistance from AIPal to rewrite your marketing material, or simply using it to reply to important email inquiries for better customer service.

Step 1: Launch Google Chrome and then click on the AIPal icon in the Chrome Extension bar.

Step 2: Inside AIPal, click on the "Write" tab to utilize AIPal's writing features.

Step 3: Now, if you want to compose your marketing material using AIPal, click on the "Compose" tab and explain your needs in the chat box.

Step 4: If you simply want to rewrite something to improve its quality and grammar, click on the "Rewrite" tab and paste the content in the chat box below.

Step 5: Lastly, AIPal has a replies feature where marketers can paste emails in the chat box to generate an effective response. To do this, click on the "Reply" tab.

Step 6: If you're not satisfied with any of the responses, click on "Chat on" to ask AIPal to make any changes that you need.

While there are many other AI tools available to assist content creators with their writing journeys, what sets AIPal apart is its ability to aid in research, navigate the internet, and analyze competitor articles effectively. It's like an all-in-one content Chrome Extension that supports writers from the beginning to the end of their writing journey.

Translating Web Pages with AIPal

AIPal is also an excellent tool for converting webpages! Imagine your company is looking to run a campaign in a new region, and your job is to research that market to gain insights. With AIPal, you can not only translate web pages but also use the Parallel Translate feature to gain real insights by experiencing their language word-for-word. Let's see how marketers can translate web pages using AIPal.

Step 1: While conducting your research on a website, hover over the AIPal icon located on the right side of the screen.

Step 2: Click on the "Translate Page" option to activate AIPal translation.

Step 3: Once translation is activated, a flyout menu will appear on the left side of the AIPal menu, offering various translation settings. For example, select the language you want to translate the webpage into.

Step 4: To enable the Parallel Translate feature, navigate to the "Display Style" section and select the "Side by side" option.

Step 5: With the combined power of AI and integration with Google Translate, your webpage will now show the original text alongside its translation.

This feature has been incredibly helpful for me, especially in learning local terminologies that can enhance the effectiveness of marketing campaigns.

AIPal's Selective Translation Capability

The AIPal translation features are amazing and not limited. Marketers can also selectively choose what to translate, in simpler terms, they can translate only specific texts. This could be a great tool as marketers delve deep to gain insights into their product or app by examining comments or reviews from people in different languages. Let's also see how AIPal helps in translating selective words.

Step 1: Let's head over to a review on Google Chrome to test the selective translation feature.

Step 2: Use the cursor to select the desired text. An AIPal icon will appear beneath the selection.

Step 3: Hover over the AIPal icon to access translation options. Choose "Translate" from the menu.

Step 4: A translation window will open at the bottom right of the Chrome interface, displaying the translated text.

Step 5: To change the translation language, click on the current translation language to open a drop down menu.

The feature of translating only selective text on webpages is really quick! Normally, one would think that they have to open the entire app and then copy and paste, but no! Just select the text, and AIPal will show up to help you translate.

Other use cases:

SEO Optimization: AIPal can assist in keyword research, content optimization, and meta tag creation to improve your website's search engine rankings. It can generate SEO-friendly blog posts, landing pages, and product descriptions tailored to your target audience.

Lead Generation: Use AIPal to create lead magnets, quizzes, and interactive content to capture leads and build your email list. It can also help you nurture leads through personalized email campaigns and follow-ups based on user interactions.

Ad Copywriting: AIPal can generate compelling ad copy for Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and other online advertising platforms. It can tailor ads to specific audience segments, help you highlight product benefits, and optimize campaigns for maximum ROI.

Grammar and Spell Check: Utilize AIPal's grammar feature to ensure error-free content before posting on social media.

Pros and Cons of AIPal

Efficiency: AIPal streamlines various tasks, saving time and increasing productivity.

Versatility: It offers a wide range of features, from writing assistance to translation and summarization.

Accessibility: AIPal is user-friendly and accessible, making it suitable for individuals with varying levels of technical expertise.

Accuracy: In many cases, AIPal provides accurate and reliable results, especially in tasks like grammar checking and summarization.

Cost-effective: AIPal often offers cost-effective solutions compared to hiring human assistants or purchasing multiple specialized software tools.

Dependency: Over-reliance on AIPal may lead to a lack of critical thinking and creativity in tasks.

Limitations: While powerful, AIPal may not always meet the complexity of certain tasks or handle nuanced situations as effectively as humans.

FAQs about AIPal

1. what are ai assistants in marketing.

AI assistants in marketing are intelligent software programs that utilize artificial intelligence (AI) principles like machine learning to automate tasks, analyze data, make predictions, and offer recommendations. These assistants, often driven by AI technologies such as chatbots and email management tools, provide several advantages to marketers:

Personalizing Customer Support: By employing chatbots, AI assistants can deliver tailored support services round the clock. They swiftly retrieve information, assist customers through inquiries, and deliver accurate responses without requiring human intervention.

Managing Calendar and Inbox: AI tools assist in managing email inboxes by prioritizing messages, filtering spam, and aiding in calendar management by suggesting meeting times and handling scheduling requests.

Social Media Management: Social media management involves using AI tools to monitor brand mentions and sentiment on platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Positive sentiment is used for targeted ads, while negative sentiment is addressed to maintain a positive brand image.

2. Are AI assistants only useful for large businesses?

No, AI assistants aren't exclusively beneficial for large businesses. They're valuable for businesses of all sizes. They help small businesses by streamlining marketing efforts, enhancing customer engagement, and enabling more efficient data-driven decision-making.

3. Do AI assistants translate languages?

AI assistants employ sophisticated machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) methods to translate languages autonomously, ensuring the preservation of the original meaning, context, and tone. These AI-driven translation tools play a crucial role in global business operations, enabling smooth communication across linguistic boundaries in diverse settings such as website adaptation, marketing content, customer service interactions, and real-time meeting translations.

Your Ultimate Marketing Tool: AIPal

Marketing is undeniably a demanding profession, requiring both creativity and critical thinking. With AIPal, the burdensome aspects of the job can be automated, allowing marketers to focus on what truly matters: crafting innovative strategies and executing them effectively. Whether it's overcoming creative blocks or navigating the complexities of campaign execution, AIPal is there to lend a helping hand. By harnessing the power of AI, marketers can streamline their workflows, unleash their creativity, and achieve remarkable results.Give AIPal a try and you won't be disappointed. Get the easy-to-use extension today and experience the difference firsthand.

1. Happy New Year 2024: Best New Year Resolution Ideas For You
2. Best Web AI Assistant in 2024 - AIPal
3. How to Make a Medical Assistant Resume Sample with No Experience
4. WPS AI as Your Copywriting Assistant [A Completed Guide]
5. 10 Best Google PDF Viewer for Android in 2024 (A Detailed Reviews)
6. Microsoft Copilot Early Access: AI Coding Assistant for Developers

15 years of office industry experience, tech lover and copywriter. Follow me for product reviews, comparisons, and recommendations for new apps and software.

Share full article

Supported by

Student Opinion

What Is Your Favorite Word?

What word in any language feels especially beautiful, interesting or meaningful to you?

The Spanish word “maleta,” written in bright yellow script, looping in and out of the word “suitcase” in block print, against a sky blue background.

By Natalie Proulx

Are you someone who loves words? Do you delight in discovering new words or trying to translate them into different languages? Do you enjoy using slang or exploring how language has evolved over time?

Is there one word, in any language, that feels especially beautiful, interesting or meaningful to you? What memories or emotions come to mind when you think it or say it?

In “ Some Words Feel Truer in Spanish ,” Natalia Sylvester writes about words and how they have the power to connect us across continents and cultures:

My earliest relationship with language was defined by rules. As an immigrant who came to this country from Peru at age 4, I spent half of my days in kindergarten occupied with learning the rules of the English language. There was the tricky inconsistency of pronunciation to navigate and, once I learned to speak it, the challenge of translating what I’d learned into reading skills. At home, my mom would often create games to help my sister and me preserve our Spanish and improve our grammar. Driving around our neighborhood in Miami, she’d point at a traffic light, hold up four fingers and say, “Se-ma-fo-ro — on which syllable do you put the accent?” Each language had its defined space: English in school, Spanish at home. But as my parents became more fluent (and my sister and I more dominant) in English, the boundaries became blurred. Being bilingual empowered us to break barriers beyond the rules and definitions attached to words. Some things were simply untranslatable, because they spoke to this new space we were living in — within, between and around language. We were making a new home here, same as so many immigrants who end up shaping language as much as it shapes us. It became evident as the phrase “Cómo se dice?” or “How do you say?” became a constant in my home. Sometimes, it’d be my parents who asked, “How do you say” followed by a word like “sobremesa” or “ganas.” It seemed simple enough in theory, but proved nearly impossible for us to translate without elaborating using full sentences or phrases. After all, to have a word to describe a long conversation that keeps you at the table and extends a meal, you’d have to value the concept enough to name it. Some ideas are so embedded in Latin American and Spanish cultures that they exist implicitly. Of course “ganas” can be something you feel but also give, and be at once more tame yet more powerful than “desire.” (If you know, you know.) Other times, it’d be my sister and I who were curious about a word’s Spanish counterpart. Was there really no differentiating in Spanish between the fingers (dedos) on our hands, and those on our feet we call toes? When we wanted to say we were excited about something, the word “emocionada” seemed to fall short of capturing our specific, well, emotion. Sometimes we would blank on a word. But sometimes, we would find that the perfect word isn’t necessarily in the language we’re speaking.

She explains further, using the Spanish word “maleta,” or “suitcase” in English, as an example:

This year, I was at a writing conference and met up with two Mexican American authors, one of whom brought her suitcase to the venue because she had already checked out of the hotel. We walked the halls and offered to help with her maleta, making several jokes and references to it, but never once using the word “suitcase,” despite speaking mainly in English. This was an entirely natural and unspoken decision. There are some words that simply feel truer in Spanish than they do in English. I call these home words and heart words because I associate them with the place I most grew up using them: at home, among family. Though the words might share a literal definition with their translation, one version carries emotional depth that enriches its meaning. To code switch this way among friends implies we share not only a language, but an intimate understanding of where we come from. A suitcase is for clothes and possessions when someone travels, but to me, a maleta meant family had arrived from Peru, carrying flavors, textures and memories of my birthplace. Language is rooted in context, which is another way of saying that language is driven by memory. In this way, what we do or don’t choose to translate is another way of telling stories about our past.

Students, read the entire article and then tell us:

Do you have a favorite word, or a word that feels especially meaningful to you, in any language? What is it? Why do you love it? Do you have a story, like the one Ms. Sylvester shared about the word “maleta,” that illustrates what your favorite word means to you?

Ms. Sylvester says there are some words that feel “truer” to her in Spanish. Do you speak more than one language? If so, are there words that feel “truer” to you in one language versus another? Why do you think that is? Can you give an example?

Ms. Sylvester writes about “code switching,” or the act of shifting from one language or dialect to another, particularly based on social context. Do you often find yourself using different words, or even different languages, depending on where you are and whom you’re with? In what dialect or language do you most feel a sense of comfort and belonging? Why?

“Words are just sounds and letters until we collectively give them meaning through story,” Ms. Sylvester ends the essay. “When we use language to connect, it’s one of the most beautiful things that make us human.” Do you agree? What power do words and language hold for you?

Students 13 and older in the United States and Britain, and 16 and older elsewhere, are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public and may appear in print.

Find more Student Opinion questions here. Teachers, check out this guide to learn how you can incorporate these prompts into your classroom.

Natalie Proulx joined The Learning Network as a staff editor in 2017 after working as an English language arts teacher and curriculum writer. More about Natalie Proulx

Watch CBS News

Pope Francis tells 60 Minutes in rare interview: "the globalization of indifference is a very ugly disease"

By Norah O'Donnell

May 19, 2024 / 7:14 PM EDT / CBS News

Francis is the first pope from the Americas, the first of his name, and more than any other pope in recent memory, has dedicated his life and ministry to the poor, the peripheral, and the forgotten. All while leading the Catholic Church on difficult, sometimes controversial issues that not everyone supports. We were granted a rare interview at the Vatican, and spoke to him, in his native Spanish, through a translator, for more than an hour. Not lost in translation was the 87 year old's warmth, intelligence and conviction. We began by discussing the Church's first World Children's Day. Next weekend, Pope Francis will welcome tens of thousands of young people to the Vatican, including refugees of war.

Norah O'Donnell: During World Children's Day, the U.N. says over a million people will be facing famine in Gaza, many of them children.

Pope Francis (In Spanish/English translation): Not just in Gaza. Think of Ukraine . Many kids from Ukraine come here. You know something? That those children don't know how to smile? I'll say something to them (mimics smile)… they have forgotten how to smile. And that is very painful.

Norah O'Donnell: Do you have a message for Vladimir Putin when it comes to Ukraine?

Pope Francis (In Spanish/English translation): Please, warring countries, all of them, stop. Stop the war. You must find a way of negotiating for peace . Strive for peace. A negotiated peace is always better than an endless war.

Norah O'Donnell: What's happening-- in Israel and Gaza , has caused so much division, so much pain around the world. I don't know if you've seen in the United States, big protests on college campuses and growing antisemitism. What would you say about how to change that?

Pope Francis (In Spanish/English translation): All ideology is bad, and antisemitism is an ideology, and it is bad. Any "anti" is always bad. You can criticize one government or another, the government of Israel, the Palestinian government. You can criticize all you want, but not "anti" a people. Neither anti-Palestinian nor antisemitic. No.

Norah O'Donnell: I know you call for peace. You have called for a cease-fire in many of your sermons. Can you help negotiate peace?

Pope Francis (In Spanish/English translation): (sighs) What I can do is pray. I pray a lot for peace. And also, to suggest, "Please, stop. Negotiate."

Prayer has been at the center of the pope's life since he was born Jorge Mario Bergoglio in Argentina, in 1936, into a family of Italian immigrants. Before entering the seminary, Bergoglio worked as a chemist.

His own personal formula is simplicity. He still wears the plain silver cross he wore as the archbishop of Buenos Aires. Though it's not what Francis wears, but where he lives that set the tone for his papacy, 11 years ago.

Instead of a palace above St. Peter's Square, he chose the Vatican guest house Casa Santa Marta as his home.

We met him there under a painting of the Virgin Mary. Surrounded by the sacred, Francis has not forsaken his sense of humor, even when discussing serious subjects, like the migrant crisis.

Norah O'Donnell: My grandparents were Catholic. Immigrated from Northern Ireland in the 1930s to the United States, seeking a better life. And I know your family, too, fled fascism. And you have talked about with migrants, many of them children, that you encourage governments to build bridges, not walls.

Pope Francis (In Spanish/English translation): Migration is something that makes a country grow. They say that you Irish migrated and brought the whiskey, and that the Italians migrated and brought the mafia… (laugh) It's a joke. Don't take it badly. But, migrants sometimes suffer a lot. They suffer a lot.

Norah O'Donnell: I grew up in Texas, and I don't know if you've heard, but the state of Texas is attempting to shut down a Catholic charity on the border with Mexico that offers undocumented migrants humanitarian assistance. What do you think of that?

Pope Francis (In Spanish/English translation): That is madness. Sheer madness. To close the border and leave them there, that is madness. The migrant has to be received. Thereafter you see how you are going to deal with him. Maybe you have to send him back, I don't know, but each case ought to be considered humanely. Right?

A few months after becoming pope, Francis went to a small Italian island near Africa, to meet migrants fleeing poverty and war.

Norah O'Donnell: Your first trip as Pope was the Island of Lampedusa, where you talked about suffering. And I was so struck when you talked about the globalization of indifference. What is happening?

Pope Francis (In Spanish/English translation): Do you want me to state it plainly? People wash their hands! There are so many Pontius Pilates on the loose out there… who see what is happening, the wars, the injustice, the crimes… "That's OK, that's OK" and wash their hands. It's indifference. That is what happens when the heart hardens… and becomes indifferent. Please, we have to get our hearts to feel again. We cannot remain indifferent in the face of such human dramas. The globalization of indifference is a very ugly disease. Very ugly.

Pope Francis has not been indifferent to the Church's most insidious scandal– the rampant sexual abuse of hundreds of thousands of children worldwide, for decades.

Norah O'Donnell: You have done more than anyone to try and reform the Catholic Church and repent for years of unspeakable sexual abuse against children by members of the clergy. But has the church done enough?

Pope Francis (In Spanish/English translation): It must continue to do more. Unfortunately, the tragedy of the abuses is enormous. And against this, an upright conscience and not only to not permit it but to put in place the conditions so that it does not happen.

Norah O'Donnell: You have said zero tolerance.

Pope Francis (In Spanish/English translation): It cannot be tolerated. When there is a case of a religious man or woman who abuses, the full force of the law falls upon them. In this there has been a great deal of progress.

It's Francis' capacity for forgiveness and openness that has defined his leadership of the Church's nearly 1.4 billion Catholics. He put them and the world on notice, during an impromptu press conference on a plane in 2013, when he spoke on the subject of homosexuality.

"If someone is gay," he said, "and he searches for the Lord and has good will…who am I to judge?"

… and he did not stop there.

Norah O'Donnell: Last year you decided to allow Catholic priests to bless same-sex couples. That's a big change. Why?

Pope Francis (In Spanish/English translation): No, what I allowed was not to bless the union. That cannot be done because that is not the sacrament. I cannot. The Lord made it that way. But to bless each person, yes. The blessing is for everyone. For everyone. To bless a homosexual-type union, however, goes against the given right, against the law of the Church. But to bless each person, why not? The blessing is for all. Some people were scandalized by this. But why? Everyone! Everyone!

Norah O'Donnell: You have said, "Who am I to judge?" "Homosexuality is not a crime."

Pope Francis (In Spanish/English translation): No. It is a human fact.

Norah O'Donnell: There are conservative bishops in the United States that oppose your new efforts to revisit teachings and traditions. How do you address their criticism?

Pope Francis (In Spanish/English translation): You used an adjective, "conservative." That is, conservative is one who clings to something and does not want to see beyond that. It is a suicidal attitude. Because one thing is to take tradition into account, to consider situations from the past, but quite another is to be closed up inside a dogmatic box.

Pope Francis has placed more women in positions of power than any of his predecessors, but he told us he opposes allowing women to be ordained as priests or deacons.

Francis' devotion to traditional doctrine led one Vatican reporter to note that he's changed the tune of the Church, but the lyrics essentially remain the same. This frustrates those who want to see him change policy on Roman Catholic priests marrying; contraception, and surrogate motherhood.

Norah O'Donnell: I know women who are cancer survivors who cannot bear children, and they turn to surrogacy. This is against church doctrine.

Pope Francis (In Spanish/English translation): In regard to surrogate motherhood , in the strictest sense of the term, no, it is not authorized. Sometimes surrogacy has become a business, and that is very bad. It is very bad.

Norah O'Donnell: But sometimes for some women it is the only hope.

Pope Francis (In Spanish/English translation): It could be. The other hope is adoption. I would say that in each case the situation should be carefully and clearly considered, consulting medically and then morally as well. I think there is a general rule in these cases, but you have to go into each case in particular to assess the situation, as long as the moral principle is not skirted. But you are right. I want to tell you that I really liked your expression when you told me, "In some cases it is the only chance." It shows that you feel these things very deeply. Thank you. (smiles)

Norah O'Donnell: I think that's why so many people-- have found hope with you, because you have been more open and accepting perhaps than other previous leaders of the church.

Pope Francis (In Spanish/English translation): You have to be open to everything. The Church is like that: Everyone, everyone, everyone. "That so-and-so is a sinner…?" Me too, I am a sinner. Everyone! The Gospel is for everyone. If the Church places a customs officer at the door, that is no longer the church of Christ. Everyone.

Norah O'Donnell: When you look at the world what gives you hope?

Pope Francis (In Spanish/English translation): Everything. You see tragedies, but you also see so many beautiful things. You see heroic mothers, heroic men, men who have hopes and dreams, women who look to the future. That gives me a lot of hope. People want to live. People forge ahead. And people are fundamentally good. We are all fundamentally good. Yes, there are some rogues and sinners, but the heart itself is good.

Produced by Keith Sharman, Julie Morse and Anna Matranga. Associate producer, Roxanne Feitel. Broadcast associates, Eliza Costas and Callie Teitelbaum. Edited by Jorge J. García.

Pope Francis sits down for a historic interview with CBS Evening News anchor and managing editor Norah O'Donnell in an hour-long special airing Monday, May 20 at 10 p.m. ET on CBS and streaming on Paramount+. In a wide-ranging conversation, Francis speaks about countries at war, his vision for the Catholic Church, his legacy, his hope for children and more.

Pope Francis
Vatican City
Catholic Church

Norah O'Donnell is the anchor and managing editor of the "CBS Evening News." She also contributes to "60 Minutes." O'Donnell is a multiple Emmy Award-winning journalist with nearly three decades of experience covering the biggest stories in the world and conducting impactful, news-making interviews.

More from CBS News

Pope Francis discusses same-sex couples, surrogacy during rare interview

Pope Francis on his health and whether he'd ever retire

CBS News surprises Pope Francis with personal gift

El Papa habla sobre parejas del mismo sexo, maternidad subrogada y esperanza

Peer Reviewed

US-skepticism and transnational conspiracy in the 2024 Taiwanese presidential election

Article metrics.

CrossRef Citations

Altmetric Score

PDF Downloads

Taiwan has one of the highest freedom of speech indexes while it also encounters the largest amount of foreign interference due to its contentious history with China. Because of the large influx of misinformation, Taiwan has taken a public crowdsourcing approach to combatting misinformation, using both fact-checking ChatBots and public dataset called CoFacts. Combining CoFacts with large-language models (LLM), we investigated misinformation across three platforms (Line, PTT, and Facebook) during the 2024 Taiwanese presidential election. We found that most misinformation appears within China-friendly political groups and attacks US-Taiwan relations through visual media like images and videos. A considerable proportion of misinformation does not question U.S. foreign policy directly. Rather, it exaggerates domestic issues in the United States to create a sense of declining U.S. state capacity. Curiously, we found misinformation rhetoric that references conspiracy groups in the West.

Program in Quantitative Social Science, Dartmouth College, USA

Department of Political Science, University of Nevada Las Vegas, USA

Department of Computer Science, Barnard College, USA

Research Questions

What are the misinformation narratives surrounding the election in Taiwan and how do they target international relations with the United States?
What geographical or temporal patterns emerge from misinformation data?
Who are the targets of these misinformation narratives and through what modalities?

Essay Summary

We leveraged a dataset of 41,291 labeled articles from Line, 911,510 posts from Facebook, and 2,005,972 posts and comments from PTT to understand misinformation dynamics through topic modeling and network analysis.
The primary form of misinformation is narratives that attack international relations with the United States (henceforth referred to as US-skepticism), specifically referencing the economy, health policy, the threat of war through Ukraine, and other U.S. domestic issues.
Temporal and spatial evidence suggests VPN-based coordination, focused on U.S. issues and addresses.
Misinformation is most common among pan-Blue and ROC identity groups on social media and is spread through visual media. These groups share many themes with conspiracy groups in Western countries.
Our study shows the prevalence of misinformation strategies using visual media and fake news websites. It also highlights how crowdsourcing and advances in large-language models can be used to identify misinformation in cross-platform workflows.

Implications

According to Freedom House, Taiwan has one of the highest indices for free speech in Asia (Freedom House, 2022). Additionally, due to its contentious history with China, it receives significant foreign interference and misinformation, especially during its presidential elections. Due to the large influx of dis- and misinformation, Taiwan has developed many strategies to counter misleading narratives, including fact-checking ChatBots on its most popular chatroom app (Chang et al., 2020). Under this information environment, the 2024 Taiwanese presidential election emerged as one of the most divisive elections in Taiwan’s history, featuring at one point a doubling of presidential candidates in a typically two-party race, from two to four. As such, Taiwan is regarded as a “canary for disinformation” against elections in 2024, as a first indicator to how foreign interference may take place in other democracies (Welch, 2024).

In this paper, we study the misinformation ecosystem in Taiwan starting a year prior to the election. First, our findings highlight the interaction between misinformation and international relations. As was reported in The Economist and The New York Times , a considerable portion of the misinformation spread in Taiwan before the 2024 election is about US-skepticism, which aims at undermining the reputation of the United States among Taiwanese people (“China is flooding Taiwan with disinformation,” 2023; Hsu, Chien, and Myers, 2023). This phenomenon is significant because it does not target specific candidates or parties in the election but may indirectly influence the vote choice between pro- and anti-U.S. parties. Given the US-China global competition and the Russia-Ukraine ongoing conflict, the reputation of the United States is crucial for the strength and reliability of democratic allies (Cohen, 2003). Hence, it is not surprising that misinformation about the United States may propagate globally and influence elections across democracies. However, our findings surprisingly show that US-skepticism also includes a considerable number of attacks on U.S. domestic politics. Such content does not question the U.S. foreign policy but undermines the perceived reliability and state capacity of the United States. Here, s tate capacity is defined as whether a state is capable of mobilizing its resources to realize its goal, which is conceptually different from motivation and trust.

US-skepticism is commonly characterized as mistrusting the motivations of the United States, as illustrated in the Latin American context due to long histories of political influence (see dependency theory; Galeano, 1997), but our findings suggest that perceived U.S. state capacity is also an important narrative. As most foreign disinformation arises from China, this indicates a greater trend where authoritarian countries turn to sharp power tactics to distort information and defame global competitors rather than winning hearts and minds through soft power. Sharp power refers to the ways in which authoritarian regimes project their influence abroad to pierce, penetrate, or perforate the informational environments in targeted countries (Walker, 2018). In Taiwan’s case, China may not be able to tell China’s story well, but can still influence Taiwanese voters by making them believe that the United States is declining. Our findings suggest that future work analyzing the topics and keywords of misinformation in elections outside the United States should also consider the US-skepticism as one latent category, not just the politicians and countries as is common with electoral misinformation (Tenove et al., 2018). These findings are corroborated by narratives identified by a recent report including drug issues, race relations, and urban decay (Microsoft Threat Intelligence, 2024).

Additionally, our research investigates both misinformation and conspiracy theories, which are closely related. Whereas misinformation is broadly described as “false or inaccurate information” (Jerit & Zhao, 2020), a conspiracy theory is the belief that harmful events are caused by a powerful, often secretive, group. In particular, conspiracy communities often coalesce around activities of “truth-seeking,” embodying a contrarian view toward commonly held beliefs (Enders et al., 2022; Harambam, 2020; Konkes & Lester, 2017). Our findings also provide evidence of transnational similarities between conspiracy groups in Taiwan and the United States. Whereas the domestic context has been explored (Chen et al., 2023; Jerit & Zhao, 2020), the intersection of partisanship and conspiracy groups as conduits for cross-national misinformation flow deserves further investigation.

Second, our findings reemphasize that an IP address is not a reliable criterion for attributing foreign intervention. Previous studies on Chinese cyber armies show that they use a VPN for their activities on Twitter (now X) (Wang et al., 2020) and Facebook (Frenkel, 2023). Commonly known as the Reddit of Taiwan, PTT is a public forum in Taiwan that by default contains the IP address of the poster. Our analysis of PTT located a group of accounts with US IP addresses that have the same activity pattern as other Taiwan-based accounts. Therefore, it is likely that these accounts use VPN to hide their geolocation. Our results provide additional evidence that this VPN strategy also appears on secondary and localized social media platforms. Our results suggest that the analysis of the originating location of misinformation should not be based entirely on IP addresses.

Third, our findings show that text is far from the only format used in the spread of misinformation. A considerable amount of misinformation identified on Facebook is spread through links (47%), videos (21%), and photos (15%). These items may echo each other’s content or even feature cross-platform flow. Proper tools are needed to extract and juxtapose content from different types of media so that researchers can have a holistic analysis of the spread and development of misinformation (Tucker et al., 2018). Such tools are urgent since mainstream social media has adopted and highly encouraged short videos—a crucial area for researchers to assess how misinformation spreads across platforms in the upcoming year of elections. This understanding is also important for fact-check agencies because they must prepare for collecting and reviewing information on various topics found in multiple media types across platforms. Crowdsourcing, data science, expert inputs, and international collaboration are all needed to deal with multi-format misinformation environments.

With prior studies showing that the aggregated fact checks (known as wisdom of the crowds) perform on par with expert ratings (see Arechar et al., 2023; Martel et al., 2023), our case study also evidences how crowdsourcing and LLM approaches can not only quickly fact-check but also summarize larger narrative trends. In Taiwan, this takes form of the CoFacts open dataset, which we use to identify misinformation narratives. CoFacts is a project initiated by g0v (pronounced “gov zero”), a civic hacktivism community in Taiwan that started in 2012. CoFacts started as a fact-checking ChatBot that circumvents the closed nature of chatroom apps, where users can forward suspicious messages or integrate the ChatBot into private rooms. These narratives are then sent to a database. Individual narratives are subsequently reviewed by more than 2,000 volunteers, including teachers, doctors, students, engineers, and retirees (Haime, 2022). As a citizen-initiated project, it is not affiliated with any government entity or party.

Crucially, these reviews provide valuable labels that are used to train AI models and fine-tune LLMs. The dataset is available open source on the popular deep-learning platform HuggingFace. Just as AI and automation can be used to spread misinformation (Chang, 2023; Chang & Ferrara, 2022; Ferrara et al., 2020; Monaco & Woolley, 2022), it can also help combat “fake news” through human-AI collaboration.

Finding 1: The primary form of misinformation is narratives that attack international relations with the United States (henceforth referred to as US-skepticism), specifically referencing the economy, health policy, the threat of war through Ukraine, and other U.S. domestic issues.

The status quo between China and Taiwan is marked by Taiwan’s self-identification as a sovereign state, which is in contrast to China’s view of Taiwan as part of its territory under the “One China” policy. As brief context, China has claimed Taiwan as its territory since 1949, but the United States has helped maintain the status quo and peace after the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950. After democratization in 1987, Taiwan’s politics have been dominated by a clear blue-green division. The blue camp is led by Kuomintang (Nationalist Party, KMT hereafter), the founding party of the Republic of China (ROC, the formal name of Taiwan’s government based on its constitution) who was defeated by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and retreated to Taiwan in 1949. The green camp is led by the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which pursues revising the ROC Constitution and changing the country’s name to Taiwan. The political cleavage between the blue and green camps is dictated by Taiwan’s relationship with the PRC and the United States. The blue camp’s position is that the PRC and ROC are under civil war but belong to the same Chinese nation, and thus the blue camp appreciates military support from the United States while enhancing economic and cultural cooperation with the PRC. The green camp believes that the necessary conditions for Taiwan to be free and independent are to stand firmly with the United States and maintain distance from the PRC. After 2020, the two major camps’ insufficient attention to domestic and social issues caused the rise of nonpartisans and a third party, the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP or the white camp), which strategically avoids discussing foreign policies. In the 2024 election, the ruling DPP party (green) was reelected with 40% of votes for the third consecutive presidency (from 2016 to 2028), while KMT (blue) and TPP (white) received 33% and 26% of votes, respectively.

The U.S. “One China” policy since 1979 indicates that the United States opposes any change to the status quo unless it is solved peacefully. This has motivated the PRC to persuade Taiwanese citizens to support unification using misinformation targeted at China-friendly political groups, as the cost of unification would be greatly reduced if sufficient Taiwanese citizens opposed U.S. military intervention. This history between the United States and Taiwan serves as the foundation of US-skepticism. In the literature, US-skepticism in Taiwan is composed of two key psychological elements: trust and motivation (Wu & Lin, 2019; Wu, 2023). First, many Taiwanese no longer trust the United States after the United States switched diplomatic ties from Taiwan (ROC) to the PRC in 1979. Many blue-camp supporters doubt the commitment of the United States to send troops should China invade, per the Taiwan Relations Act (Wu & Lin, 2019). Second, Taiwanese citizens question Taiwan’s role as a proxy in a potential war with China instead of sincerely protecting democracy and human rights in Taiwan (Wu, 2023).

The CoFacts dataset contains 140,314 articles submitted by Line users, which are then fact-checked by volunteers as rumor (47%), not a rumor (21%), not an article (19%), and opinion (13%). Here, rumor is synonymous with misinformation. Using the CoFacts dataset, we trained a BERTopic model to identify 34 forms of misinformation and then ranked them by their overlap with the word “elections” in Mandarin Chinese (George & Sumathy, 2023; Nguyen et al., 2020). Table 1 shows the top nine narratives.

Many of these narratives are directly related to political parties or the democratic process. For instance, the highest-ranked topic is attacking the incumbent party (the DPP) at 18.1%, which contains 2,371 total posts. The subsequent misinformation topics focus on policy issues and specific narratives—international relations, issues of marriage and birth rate, vaccines, nuclear energy, biometrics, egg imports, and the war in Ukraine. These are known cleavage issues and overlap with the eight central concerns during the election cycle—economic prosperity, cross-strait affairs, wealth distribution, political corruption, national security, social reform/stability, and environmental protection (Achen & Wang, 2017; Achen & Wang, 2019; Chang & Fang, 2023).

We focus on the third type of misinformation, which is the relationship between Taiwan, the United States, and China. US-skepticism is not only the largest at 10,826 individual posts, but one flagged by journalists, policymakers, and politicians as one of the most crucial themes. This is a relatively new phenomenon in terms of proportion, which aims to sow distrust toward the United States (“China is flooding Taiwan with disinformation,” 2023). In contrast, questioning the fairness of process (i.e. ballot numbers) and policy positions (i.e. gay marriage) are common during elections. However, US-skeptical misinformation diverges in that there is no explicit political candidate or party targeted. By sampling the topic articles within this category and validating using an LLM-summarizer through the ChatGPT API, we identified three specific narratives:

(a) The United States and the threat of war: Ukraine intersects frequently in this topic, with videos of direct military actions. Example: “Did you hear former USA military strategist Jack Keane say the Ukrainian war is an investment. The USA spends just $66,000,000,000 and can make Ukraine and Russia fight… Keane then mentions Taiwan is the same, where Taiwanese citizens are an ‘investment’ for Americans to fight a cheap war. The USA is cold and calculating, without any actual intent to help Taiwan!”

(b) Economic atrophy due to fiscal actions by the United States: These narratives focus on domestic policy issues in Taiwan such as minimum wage and housing costs. Example: “The USA printed 4 trillion dollars and bought stocks everywhere in the world, including Taiwan, and caused inflation and depressed wages. Be prepared!”

(c) Vaccine supply and the United States: While some narratives focus on the efficacy of vaccines, several describe the United States intentionally limiting supply during the pandemic. Example: “Taiwanese Dr. Lin is a leading scientist at Moderna, yet sells domestically at $39 per two doses, $50 to Israel. Taiwan must bid at least $60! The United States clearly does not value Taiwan.”

These narratives reveal a new element to US-skepticism: state capacity. As previously mentioned, state capacity is defined as whether a state is capable of mobilizing its resources to realize its goal. The Ukraine war and vaccine supply narratives both question the United States’ motivations in foreign policies and perceived trustworthiness. Meanwhile, the economic atrophy narrative is based on the United States’ domestic budgetary deficit and downstream impact on Taiwanese economy. These narratives frame U.S. state capacity as declining and imply that the United States could no longer realize any other commitment due to its lack of resources and capacity. The goal of such a narrative is to lower the Taiwanese audience’s belief that the United States will help. But such a narrative does not include keywords of its target group (e.g., Taiwan) nor the PCR’s goal (e.g., unification) and only works through framing and priming as an example of sharp power.

The specific focus of misinformation narratives related to the United States is composed of Ukraine (28.8%), the economy and fiscal policies (33.1%), technology (25.2%), and vaccine supply (9.9%). Misinformation related to state capacity takes up approximately 52.4%, more than half of all narratives (see Figure A1, part a in the Appendix). In all narratives, political parties are only referenced 27.8% of the time with the DPP the primary target (26.2%), which is almost half of the proportion for state capacity. China is only mentioned in tandem with the United States in 38.4% of the posts (see Figure A1, part b in the Appendix).

Finding 2: Temporal and spatial evidence suggests VPN-based coordination, focused on U.S. issues and addresses.

Once we identified the top misinformation narratives using Line, we investigated information operations or coordination. Line is one of Taiwan’s most popular communication apps featuring chatrooms (similar to WhatsApp), with 83% usage. One limitation of Line is that although we can analyze message content, Line chatrooms can be seen as conversations behind “closed doors”—platforms cannot impose content moderation and researchers have no access to the users themselves nor to the private chatroom in which users engage with misinformation (Chang et al., 2020). PTT, on the other hand, provides a public forum-like environment in which users can interact. Figure 1 shows the co-occurrence network of users who post comments under the same forum. Each circle (node) represents a user who posts on PTT. If two users make mutual comments on more than 200 posts, then they are connected (form a tie). Intuitively, this means if two users are connected or “close” to each other by mutual connections, then they are likely coordinating or have extremely similar behaviors. The placement of the users reflects this and is determined by their connections.

Using the Louvain algorithm (Traag, 2015), a common method to identify communities on social networks, five communities emerged from our dataset. Each community is colored separately, with clear clusters, except for teal which is more integrated. In particular, the yellow cluster is significantly separate from the others. This means they share significant activity amongst their own community, but less so with other communities. This suggests premeditated coordination rather than organic discussion, as the users would have to target the same post with high frequency. Prior studies have shown analyzing temporal patterns can provide insight into information operations. Specifically, overseas content farms often follow a regular cadence, posting content before peak hours in Taiwan on Twitter (Wang et al., 2020) and YouTube (Hsu & Lin, 2023).

To better understand the temporal dynamics on PTT, we plotted the distribution of posts and comments over a 24-hour period. Specifically, we focused on the top two countries by volume—Taiwan and the United States. Figure 2, part a shows the time of posting. Taiwan’s activity increases from 6 in the morning until it peaks at noon (when people are on lunch break), then steadily declines into the night. In contrast, posts from the United States peak at midnight and 8 a.m. Taipei time, which corresponds to around noon and 8 p.m. in New York, respectively. This provides an organic baseline as to when we might expect people to post.

However, in Figure 2, part b, while the distribution for Taiwan (blue) remains unchanged, the peak for the United States (orange) occurs at the same time as Taiwan. One explanation is that users are responding to posts in Taiwan. The second is that users in Asia—potentially China—are using a VPN to appear as if they are in the United States. This coincides with a report by Meta Platforms that found large numbers of CCP-operated Facebook accounts and subsequently removed them (Frenkel, 2023).

The more curious issue is when considering the activity of the yellow group from Figure 1, the temporal pattern (green) shows a sharp increase in activity at 10 a.m., which then coincides with both the peaks for Taiwan (12) and the United States (22). The sudden burst of activity is consistent with prior findings on content farms from China, where posting behavior occurs when content farm workers clock in regularly for work (Wang et al., 2020). While it is difficult to prove the authenticity of these accounts, the structural and temporal aspects suggest coordination. Figure A2 in the appendix shows further evidence of coordination through the frequency distribution of counts for co-occurring posts. For the US-based group, a distribution akin to a power law appears, commonly found within social systems (Adamic & Huberman, 2000; Chang et al., 2023; Clauset et al., 2009). In contrast, the coordinated group features a significantly heavier tail, with a secondary, “unnatural,” peak at around 15 co-occurrences.

To better understand the content of these groups, Table A1 shows the summary of comments of each group and the originating post, using a large-language model for abstractive summarization (see Methods). We report the top points for comments and posts in Table A1. The coordinated community focuses on businessman Terry Gou, who considered running as a blue-leaning independent. The comments attack the incumbent DPP and their stance toward foreign policy. One popular post features President Tsai’s controversial meeting with Kevin McCarthy, then the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. When a journalist asked McCarthy if he would “invite President Tsai to Congress… or… Washington,” McCarthy replied, “I don’t have any invitation out there right now. Today we were able to meet her as she transits through America, I thought that was very productive.” While this was positively framed, the title of the post itself was translated as “McCarthy will not invite Tsai to the United States” (Doomdied, 2023). This takes on a common tactic in misinformation where statements are intentionally distorted to produce negative framings of a particular candidate.

Comments from U.S. IP addresses between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. focus on the potential alliance between the KMT and TPP. These posts are KMT-leaning with criticism toward both Lai and Ko, who are two oppositional candidates to the KMT. Some users argue that while the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is a negative force, the United States is not automatically a positive force, as the United States does not explicitly support Taiwan’s international recognition or economic integration. In general, both posts and comments express that Taiwan should not rely too heavily on either China or the United States. This echoes the element of trust in the US-skepticism from the historical experience between ROC and the United States.

Both the U.S.-based and coordinated groups appear as blue-leaning audiences. What differentiates the first and second case is clear evidence of misinformation in the former through inaccurate framing. While US-skepticism may be a valid political stance, if the ambient information environment contains inaccurate information, then the democratic deliberative process is at risk. The case of US-skepticism is also one where stance and truth-value are often conflated, which may influence the process of voter deliberation.

Finding 3: Misinformation is most common among pan-Blue and ROC identity groups on social media and is spread through visual media. These groups share themes with conspiracy groups in Western countries.

Lastly, we considered the groups in which misinformation is common and the way misinformation is delivered. To do so, we queried CrowdTangle using the titles and links from the CoFacts dataset specific to US-Taiwan relations. This yielded 4,632 posts from public groups. Table 2 shows the groups ranked by the total number of misinformation articles identified.

There are two themes to these groups. First, they are often pan-Blue media outlets ( CTI News ), politician support groups ( Wang Yo-Zeng Support Group ), and ROC national identity groups ( I’m an ROC Fan ). The second type is somewhat unexpected but extremely interesting; it consists of groups that espouse freedom of speech ( Support CTI News and Free Speech ) and truth-seeking ( Truth Engineering Taiwan Graduate School ), topics often regarded as conspiracies. These topics are reminiscent of those in the West, such as the rhetoric around “fake news” and “truthers,” and paint a transnational picture of how misinformation coalesces. The second largest group is Trump for the World , which supports a politician known to court conspiracy theory groups such as QAnon. These groups also serve as the “capacity” element of US-skepticism, implying that the United States is in trouble for its domestic issues and is not a reliable partner to Taiwan. Furthermore, these groups have sizable followings—ranging from 8,279 to 43,481. We show the mean, as the total number of members fluctuated over our one-year period.

Lastly, we found that the majority of misinformation contains some form of multimedia, such as video (36%) or photos (15%), as shown in Figure 3, part a. Only 1% is a direct status. This may be due to CrowdTangle not surfacing results from normal users, but the ratio of multimedia to text is quite high. This aligns with extant studies showing the growth of multimodal misinformation (Micallef et al., 2022) and also user behavior in algorithm optimization (Chang et al., 2022; Dhanesh et al., 2022; Pulley, 2020)—posts with multimedia tend to do better than posts with only text.

Moreover, 47% contain a URL. Figure 3, part b shows one of the top domains containing misinformation (beyondnews852.com) after filtering out common domains such as YouTube. The site is named “Beyond News Net” and is visually formatted like a legitimate news site to increase the perceived credibility of information (Flanagin & Metzger, 2007; Wölker & Powell, 2021). The ability to rapidly generate legitimate-looking news sites as a tactic for misinformation may become a challenge for both media literacy and technical approaches to fight misinformation.

We utilized three unique misinformation datasets—Line, Facebook, and PTT—with dates between 01/12/2023 and 11/10/2023. The CoFacts dataset includes 140,193 received messages, 96,432 that have been labeled as misinformation, facts, opinion, or not relevant. Of this, 41,564 entries are misinformation. The CoFacts dataset is not only methodologically useful but exemplifies a crowd-sourced approach to fact-checking misinformation as an actual platform intervention. Moreover, it is public and transparent, allowing for replicability. Using a subset of articles and posts containing misinformation, we trained a topic model using BERTopic (Grootendorst, 2022). On a high level, using BERTopic involves five steps: 1) extract embeddings using a sentence transformer, 2) reduce dimensionality, 3) cluster reduced embeddings, 4) tokenize topics, and 5) create topic representation.

We conducted several trials, experimenting with parameters such as different sentence transformer models and minimum cluster sizes for the HDBSCAN clustering algorithm. The model used to extract topics for this paper utilized paraphrase-multilingual-MiniLM-L12-v2 for our sentence embedding model (Reimers & Gurevych, 2019), had a minimum cluster size of 80 for the clustering algorithm, and used tokenize_zh for our tokenizer. Our model yielded 34 topics. We also trained a model based on latent-Dirichlet allocation (LDA) (Blei et al., 2003), but found the BERTopic results to be more interpretable. We then labeled all messages to indicate whether they included reference to the election or not, and ranked the topics by their election-related percentage to measure electoral salience. For our subsequent analysis, we focused on topic 3 (see Table 1), which captures general discourse about the relations between the United States, China, and Taiwan.

The Facebook dataset was extracted using CrowdTangle. We queried posts containing links and headlines from topic 3. We also cross-sectioned these links and headlines with a general election-based dataset with 911,510 posts. This yielded a total of 4,632 of posts shared on public Facebook groups and 227,125 engagements. Due to privacy concerns, it is not possible to obtain private posts from users on their own Facebook timelines, private groups, or messages. However, public groups are a good proxy for general discourse, in addition to providing ethnic or partisan affiliations via their group name (Chang & Fang, 2023). In other words, while CoFacts provides the misinformation narratives, Facebook public groups give insight into the targets of misinformation.

Lastly, we scraped PTT using Selenium. Commonly known as the Reddit of Taiwan, PTT is unique in that it contains the IP address of the poster, though this could be shrouded by proxy farms or VPNs. First, we scraped all posts that contained reference to the United States and the election, which yielded 22,576 posts and 1,983,396 comments, all with IP addresses, addresses provided by PTT, and the time of posting. We expanded the scope of this analysis as we were interested in the general discourse directly related to the United States, and the geospatial and temporal patterns that arose.

Due to the large amount of data, there are three general approaches we could have taken—local extractive summarization with LLMs, local abstractive summarization with LLMs, and server-based abstractive summarization (such as ChatGPT). Local extractive summarization is a method that embeds each of the input sentences and then outputs five of the most representative sentences. However, this approach is often too coarse, as it returns sentences with the highest centrality but does not summarize general themes across all the different comments or posts. On the other hand, abstractive summarization works by considering the entire context by ingesting many documents and then summarizing across them. This provides a more generalized characterization of key themes. However, the input size is the primary bottleneck as large-language models can only ingest so many tokens (or words), which also need to be held in memory—the case for our project, as we are summarizing more than 10,000 posts.

To circumvent these issues, we sampled the maximum number of posts or comments that could fit within 16,000 tokens and then made a query call using the ChatGPT API. This provided a summary based on a probabilistic sample of the posts and comments.

/ Elections

Cite this Essay

Chang, H. C. H., Wang, A. H. E., & Fang Y. S. (2024). US-skepticism and transnational conspiracy in the 2024 Taiwanese presidential election. Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) Misinformation Review . https://doi.org/10.37016/mr-2020-144

Bibliography

Achen, C. H., & Wang, T. Y. (2017). The Taiwan voter . University of Michigan Press. https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.9375036

Achen, C. H., & Wang, T. Y. (2019). Declining voter turnout in Taiwan: A generational effect? Electoral Studies , 58 , 113–124. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.electstud.2018.12.011

Adamic, L. A., & Huberman, B. A. (2000). Power-law distribution of the World Wide Web. Science, 287 (5461), 2115–2115. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.287.5461.2115a

Arechar, A. A., Allen, J., Berinsky, A. J., Cole, R., Epstein, Z., Garimella, K., Gully, A., Lu, J. G., Ross, R. M., Stagnaro, M. N., Zhang, Y., Pennycook, G., & Rand, D. G. (2023). Understanding and combatting misinformation across 16 countries on six continents. Nature Human Behaviour , 7 (9), 1502–1513. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-023-01641-6

Blei, D. M., Ng, A. Y., & Jordan, M. I. (2003). Latent Dirichlet allocation. Journal of Machine Learning Research, 3, 993–1022. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/944919.944937

Chang, H.-C. H. (2023). Nick Monaco and Samuel Woolley, Bots. [Review of the book Bots , by N. Monaco, & S. Woolley]. International Journal of Communication , 17 , 3.

Chang, H.-C. H., & Fang, Y. S. (2024). The 2024 Taiwanese Presidential Election on social media: Identity, policy, and affective virality. PNAS Nexus, 3 (4). https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgae130

Chang, H.-C. H., & Ferrara, E. (2022). Comparative analysis of social bots and humans during the COVID-19 pandemic. Journal of Computational Social Science , 5, 1409–1425. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42001-022-00173-9

Chang, H.-C. H., Haider, S., & Ferrara, E. (2021). Digital civic participation and misinformation during the 2020 Taiwanese presidential election. Media and Communication, 9 (1), 144–157. https://doi.org/10.17645/mac.v9i1.3405

Chang, H.-C. H., Harrington, B., Fu, F., & Rockmore, D. N. (2023). Complex systems of secrecy: The offshore networks of oligarchs. PNAS Nexus, 2 (4), pgad051. https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgad112

Chang, H.-C. H., Richardson, A., & Ferrara, E. (2022). #JusticeforGeorgeFloyd: How Instagram facilitated the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. PLOS ONE , 17 (12), e0277864. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0277864

China is flooding Taiwan with disinformation. (2023, September 26). The Economist . https://www.economist.com/asia/2023/09/26/china-is-flooding-taiwan-with-disinformation

Clauset, A., Shalizi, C. R., & Newman, M. E. (2009). Power-law distributions in empirical data. SIAM Review, 51 (4), 661–703. https://doi.org/10.1137/070710111

Dhanesh, G., Duthler, G., & Li, K. (2022). Social media engagement with organization-generated content: Role of visuals in enhancing public engagement with organizations on Facebook and Instagram. Public Relations Review , 48 (2), 102174. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pubrev.2022.102174

Doomdied. (2023, April 6). [Hot Gossip] McCarthy: Will not invite President Tsai to congress or DC . PTT. https://disp.cc/b/Gossiping/fXNG

Enders, A., Farhart, C., Miller, J., Uscinski, J., Saunders, K., & Drochon, H. (2022). Are Republicans and conservatives more likely to believe conspiracy theories? Political Behavior , 45 , 2001–2024. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-022-09812-3

Ferrara, E., Chang, H., Chen, E., Muric, G., & Patel, J. (2020). Characterizing social media manipulation in the 2020 US presidential election. First Monday, 25 (11). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v25i11.11431

Flanagin, A. J., & Metzger, M. J. (2007). The role of site features, user attributes, and information verification behaviors on the perceived credibility of web-based information. New Media & Society , 9 (2), 319–342. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444807075015

Freedom House (2022). Freedom index by country. https://freedomhouse.org/countries/freedom-world/scores

Frenkel, S. (2023, August 29). Meta’s “biggest single takedown” removes Chinese influence campaign. The New York Times . https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/29/technology/meta-china-influence-campaign.html

Galeano, E. H., & Galeano, E. (1997). Open veins of Latin America: Five centuries of the pillage of a continent. NYU Press.

George, L., & Sumathy, P. (2023). An integrated clustering and BERT framework for improved topic modeling. International Journal of Information Technology , 15 (4), 2187–2195. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41870-023-01268-w

Grootendorst, M. (2022). BERTopic: Neural topic modeling with a class-based TF-IDF procedure . arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2203.05794

Haime, J. (2022, September 19). Taiwan’s amateur fact-checkers wage war on fake news from China. Al Jazeera . https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2022/9/19/taiwan

Harambam, J. (2020). Contemporary conspiracy culture: Truth and knowledge in an era of epistemic instability . Routledge.

Hsu, L.-Y., & Lin, S.-H. (2023). Party identification and YouTube usage patterns: An exploratory analysis. Taiwan Politics. https://taiwanpolitics.org/article/88117-party-identification-and-youtube-usage-patterns-an-exploratory-analysis

Hsu, T., Chien, A. C., & Myers, S. L. (2023, November 26). Can Taiwan continue to fight off Chinese disinformation? The New York Times . https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/26/business/media/taiwan-china-disinformation.html

Jerit, J., & Zhao, Y. (2020). Political misinformation. Annual Review of Political Science , 23 (1), 77–94. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-polisci-050718-032814

Konkes, C., & Lester, L. (2017). Incomplete knowledge, rumour and truth seeking. Journalism Studies , 18 (7), 826–844. https://doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2015.1089182

Martel, C., Allen, J., Pennycook, G., & Rand, D. G. (2023). Crowds can effectively identify misinformation at scale. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 19 (2), 316–319. https://doi.org/10.1177/17456916231190388

Micallef, N., Sandoval-Castañeda, M., Cohen, A., Ahamad, M., Kumar, S., & Memon, N. (2022). Cross-platform multimodal misinformation: Taxonomy, characteristics and detection for textual posts and videos. Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media , 16 , 651–662. https://doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v16i1.19323

Microsoft Threat Intelligence (2024). Same targets, new playbooks: East Asia threat actors employ unique methods. Microsoft Threat Analysis Center. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/security-insider/intelligence-reports/east-asia-threat-actors-employ-unique-methods

Monaco, N., & Woolley, S. (2022). Bots . John Wiley & Sons.

Nguyen, D. Q., Vu, T., & Nguyen, A. T. (2020). BERTweet: A pre-trained language model for English Tweets . arXiv. http://arxiv.org/abs/2005.10200

Pulley, P. G. (2020). Increase engagement and learning: Blend in the visuals, memes, and GIFs for online content. In Emerging Techniques and Applications for Blended Learning in K-20 Classrooms (pp. 137–147). IGI Global.

Reimers, N., & Gurevych, I. (2019). Sentence-BERT: Sentence embeddings using Siamese BERT-networks . arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1908.10084

Traag, V. A. (2015). Faster unfolding of communities: Speeding up the Louvain algorithm. Physical Review. E, Statistical, Nonlinear, and Soft Matter Physics , 92 (3), 032801. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.92.032801

Walker, C. (2018). What Is “Sharp Power”? Journal of Democracy, 29 (3) , 9–23. https://doi.org/10.1353/jod.2018.0041

Wang, A. H.-E., Lee, M.-C., Wu, M.-H., & Shen, P. (2020). Influencing overseas Chinese by tweets: text-images as the key tactic of Chinese propaganda. Journal of Computational Social Science, 3 (2), 469–486. https://doi.org/10.1007%2Fs42001-020-00091-8

Welch, D. (2024, January 19). Taiwan’s election: 2024’s canary in the coal mine for disinformation against democracy. Alliance For Securing Democracy. https://securingdemocracy.gmfus.org/taiwans-election-2024s-canary-in-the-coal-mine-for-disinformation-against-democracy/

Wölker, A., & Powell, T. E. (2021). Algorithms in the newsroom? News readers’ perceived credibility and selection of automated journalism. Journalism , 22 (1), 86–103. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884918757072

Wu, A. (2023). To reassure Taiwan and deter China, the United States should learn from history. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 79 (2), 72–79. https://doi.org/10.1080/00963402.2023.2178174

Wu, C. L., & Lin, A. M. W. (2019). The certainty of uncertainty: Taiwanese public opinion on US–Taiwan relations in the early Trump presidency. World Affairs, 182 (4), 350–369.

No funding has been received to conduct this research.

Competing Interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

No human subjects were included in this study.

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided that the original author and source are properly credited.

Data Availability

All materials needed to replicate this study are available via the Harvard Dataverse: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/5SPGDY . The Cofacts database is available on HuggingFace and Facebook via CrowdTangle per regulation of Meta Platforms.

Acknowledgements

H. C. would like to thank Brendan Nyhan, Sharanya Majumder, John Carey, and Adrian Rauschfleish for their comments. H. C. would like to thank the Dartmouth Burke Research Initiation Award.

All authors contributed equally.

IMAGES

Paraphrase: Definition and Useful Examples of Paraphrasing in English
💐 How to paraphrase correctly. How To Do Paraphrasing Properly: 5
How to Paraphrase like a Straight A Student
How To Paraphrase In Six Easy Steps
How To Paraphrase in IELTS Writing
SKILL FOCUS

VIDEO

Basic Words Translation
some important words,translation and synonyms with knowledge king M.K Singh

COMMENTS

Paraphrasing Tool
QuillBot's AI-powered paraphrasing tool will enhance your writing. Your words matter, and our paraphrasing tool is designed to ensure you use the right ones. With unlimited Custom modes and 9 predefined modes, Paraphraser lets you rephrase text countless ways. Our product will improve your fluency while also ensuring you have the appropriate ...
Rewrite your text with precision and ease
Incorporated into translator: Translate your text into English or German, and click "Improve translation" to explore alternate versions of your translation.No more copy/paste between tools. Easy-to-see changes: When you insert the text to be rewritten, activate "Show changes" to see suggested edits. AI-powered suggestions: By deactivating "Show changes", you can click on any word to see ...
DeepL Translate: The world's most accurate translator
Indeed, a few tests show that DeepL Translator offers better translations than Google Translate when it comes to Dutch to English and vice versa. RTL Z. Netherlands. In the first test - from English into Italian - it proved to be very accurate, especially good at grasping the meaning of the sentence, rather than being derailed by a literal ...
Language Translator: Advanced AI Translator Tool—QuillBot AI
What you can do with QuillBot's online translator. Translate longer texts. Use a translator without ads. Translate text in 45 languages. Edit text and cite sources at the same time with integrated writing tools. Enjoy completely free translation. Use the power of AI to translate text quickly and accurately. Translate online—without ...
AI-based Paraphrasing Tool
Strengthen Your Communication Skills. Try out the best paraphrasing tool for free and discover how LanguageTool can elevate your writing. Enhance your writing with LanguageTool's AI-based paraphrasing tool. Discover a smarter way to rewrite and refine your text for improved clarity and uniqueness.
Paraphrasing Tool
Paraphrasing involves expressing someone else's ideas or thoughts in your own words while maintaining the original meaning. Paraphrasing tools can help you quickly reword text by replacing certain words with synonyms or restructuring sentences. They can also make your text more concise, clear, and suitable for a specific audience.
Free Rewrite and Paraphrasing Tool
Wordtune's Rewrite is a free AI paraphrasing tool that helps you improve anything you write. ... Choose from one of 10 languages to translate into English. Create content that ... as someone who writes a-lot of sales related copy wordtune helps me personalize and gives me ideas on how to rewrite words or sentences. Noel Pagan. Always say what ...
Wordtune: Free AI Writing Assistant
Instantly paraphrase emails, articles, messages and more. Read and Summarize. Maximize your efficiency by summarizing any text or video. ... My goal in support operations is to translate technical language into clear and understandable English — Wordtune helps me achieve just that. Tomer Ben-Arye. Support Operations Manager. 20%. faster task ...
DeepL Write: AI-powered writing companion
Write with confidence, powered by AI beta. Get perfect spelling, grammar, and punctuation. Sound fluent, professional, and natural. Fine-tune your writing with word and sentence alternatives. Choose a writing style and tone that fits your audience.
Free AI Paraphrasing Tool
Ahrefs' Paraphrasing Tool uses a language model that learns patterns, grammar, and vocabulary from large amounts of text data - then uses that knowledge to generate human-like text based on a given prompt or input. The generated text combines both the model's learned information and its understanding of the input.
Paraphrasing Tool
Our paraphrasing tool online lets you paraphrase text in one go. You can use this free tool to paraphrase your sentences, paragraphs, articles, and even long blogs with advanced AI technology. It further provides several useful features that help you customize the rephrased text to fit your content needs. 🥰 Improves:
InstaText
InstaText works as a rewriter that can rephrase, paraphrase or correct my sentence, paragraph or even entire article. Write like a ... projects and abstracts for conferences. The tool provides very useful suggestions that help me to translate the text to a professional level so that no additional review by "native speakers" is required. The ...
How to Paraphrase
Source text Paraphrase "The current research extends the previous work by revealing that listening to moral dilemmas could elicit a FLE [foreign-language effect] in highly proficient bilinguals. … Here, it has been demonstrated that hearing a foreign language can even influence moral decision making, and namely promote more utilitarian-type decisions" (Brouwer, 2019, p. 874).
Translation Techniques
Translation Techniques - Paraphrasing . A paraphrase is a restatement of the meaning of a text or passage using other words. The term itself is derived via Latin paraphrasis from Greek, meaning "additional manner of expression". In the past, paraphrasing and translation were considered to be unconnected language processing tasks.
Paraphrasing tool NeuralWriter
Lots of people use NeuralWriter for paraphrasing, all you have to do is insert the text into the window and click "Paraphrase now", then we will give you the finished paraphrased text and you can even see where we replaced the words. NeuralWriter is the best free online paraphrasing tool with a diff checker With us, you can easily: rewrites ...
Paraphrasing tools, language translation tools and plagiarism: an
Comparing online language translation and paraphrasing tools. Prior to learning of the existence of online paraphrasing tools, we had assumed that students were authoring work in their first language, and then using online translation tools to convert the text to English. Perhaps the most notable and available online free translation tool ...
(PDF) Paraphrasing as a translation strategy
Paraphrase is a translation technique used to restate or reword the meaning of a text from the source text into the target text (Harmon, 2013 This anger speech act is an indirect verbal sign. Alex ...
Need to simplify/summarize text online?
Simplify text or Generate Multi-lingual Multi-document Summaries. Maximum 5000 words. Simplification is achieved by paraphrasing the original text using a working vocabulary of 1,000 words based on C.K. Ogden's Basic English, and explaining in footnotes, using this basic vocabulary, more complex words (currently, a 35,000-word advanced ...
Rewordify.com
Try for free. Rewordify.com is powerful, free, online software that improves reading, learning, and teaching. This site can: Intelligently simplify difficult English, for faster comprehension. Effectively teach words, for building a better vocabulary. Help teachers save time and produce engaging lessons.
Modern English Shakespeare Translations
The Winter's Tale. A family's tragedy concludes happily in this modern translation of Shakespeare's romance play. Actually understand Shakespeare, with side-by-side modern English translations of every Shakespeare play, sonnet, and longer poem.
AI language translation startup DeepL nabs $300M on a $2B valuation to
DeepL, which builds automated text translation and writing tools that compete against the likes of Google Translate and Grammarly, said on Wednesday that it has raised an additional $300 million ...
6 Best Spanish Paraphrasing Tools
More powerful paraphrasing for all modes and languages. 6. Reescribir textos. Rewrite Texts (or Reescribir textos in Spanish) is the best Spanish paraphrasing tool you'll get, as it exclusively rewrites for Spanish content writers! (This also means you'll need to change it to "English" in the URL translator tab!)
Fundamentally serious: closing remarks: Translation Studies: Vol 0, No
3 In paraphrasing our arguments, their response uses some striking language: "treason", "slander", "besmirch", and "bastardize" (there is also the straw man argument that Markoosie never "despised" the English version of his text). ... University of Edmonton and former director of the British Centre for Literary Translation ...
Free AI Sentence Rewriter Tool
Content editing and enhancement. Ahrefs' AI Sentence Rewriter Tool can be highly useful for content creators, writers, and editors who want to improve the quality and clarity of their sentences. By inputting sentences into the tool, users can receive rephrased versions that offer enhanced readability, improved flow, and better overall structure.
'Kairos' by Jenny Erpenbeck wins 2024 International Booker Prize : NPR
Thomas Lohnes/Getty Images. Kairos, a novel about a love affair between a younger woman and older man in 1980s Germany, has won this year's International Booker Prize. The award is one of the most ...
Best AI Assistant for Marketing in 2024
Translate: Access real-time parallel translation services with side-by-side comparison, breaking down language barriers and facilitating communication across languages. Grammar: Benefit from auto spell check and paraphrasing features, ensuring that your text is error-free and articulated clearly.
What Is Your Favorite Word?
We were making a new home here, same as so many immigrants who end up shaping language as much as it shapes us. It became evident as the phrase "Cómo se dice?" or "How do you say?" became ...
Pope Francis tells 60 Minutes in rare interview: "the globalization of
In a rare interview, Pope Francis answers questions on global conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, migrants in the U.S., sexual abuse in the church, and more during a conversation with Norah O'Donnell.
US-skepticism and transnational conspiracy in the 2024 Taiwanese
English Translation # Misinfo Identified: ... The model used to extract topics for this paper utilized paraphrase-multilingual-MiniLM-L12-v2 for our sentence embedding model (Reimers & Gurevych, 2019), had a minimum cluster size of 80 for the clustering algorithm, and used tokenize_zh for our tokenizer. ... (Chang & Fang, 2023). In other words ...