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The present paper provides an overview of an online module for formative assessment of summary writing skills for second language (L2) introductory academic writing instruction in Japan and presents initial empirical results on how Japanese undergraduate students' summary writing performance changed with a series of automated summary content feedback delivered in the module. A key feature of this module was the provision of fine-grained feedback delivered as scaffolding during revisions in terms of two key aspects of summary content: main idea representation and paraphrasing. Participants were 64 Japanese undergraduate engineering majors in introductory academic writing courses at a private university in Tokyo. The students completed two summary writing tasks provided through the online module. Results of a multivariate analysis of variance showed significant improvement of the content analytic score on revision on the initial summary task, and that this improved performance level was retained on a transfer task. The language use analytic score also improved significantly on the transfer task. Detailed analyses of learner-produced summaries based on descriptive statistics further suggested that the learners made substantively meaningful changes concerning main idea coverage and verbatim copying of the source text while still meeting the length requirement, although the results differed somewhat across the source texts assigned. Despite some study limitations, these results provide initial support for immediate content feedback provision for the development of basic summary writing skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research aims to examine how higher education students paraphrase their academic writing to reduce high Turnitin similarity scores. The research uses a descriptive-qualitative research design. Data were collected through observations and in-depth interviews. The observation was conducted by analyzing 20 higher education students' theses in terms of paraphrasing practices. The in-depth interviews with five selected participants were conducted by asking some questions related to the observation results about paraphrasing practices. Based on the observation and the in-depth interviews, the researcher found that most of the students prefer to do paraphrasing practices online compared to paraphrasing practices manually. In addition, most students already know the meaning of paraphrasing but some students have not applied it adequately. The researchers conclude that online paraphrasing is a great idea that can be used to simplify paraphrasing activities. However, the students need to re-read the results of the paraphrase from the online paraphrase to be analyzed and revised if needed. It is crucial to focus on the overall quality of the paraphrased results, making sure to check for proper word choice and grammar. In addition, further research is required to determine the extent to which the text's original context and meaning have been successfully maintained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we study natural language paraphrasing from both corpus creation and modeling points of view. We focus in particular on the methodology that allows the extraction of challenging examples of paraphrase pairs in their natural textual context, leading to a dataset potentially more suitable for evaluating the models' ability to represent meaning, especially in document context, when compared with those gathered using various sentence-level heuristics. To this end, we introduce the Turku Paraphrase Corpus, the first large-scale, fully manually annotated corpus of paraphrases in Finnish. The corpus contains 104,645 manually labeled paraphrase pairs, of which 98% are verified to be true paraphrases, either universally or within their present context. In order to control the diversity of the paraphrase pairs and avoid certain biases easily introduced in automatic candidate extraction, the paraphrases are manually collected from different paraphrase-rich text sources. This allows us to create a challenging dataset including longer and more lexically diverse paraphrases than can be expected from those collected through heuristics. In addition to quality, this also allows us to keep the original document context for each pair, making it possible to study paraphrasing in context. To our knowledge, this is the first paraphrase corpus which provides the original document context for the annotated pairs. We also study several paraphrase models trained and evaluated on the new data. Our initial paraphrase classification experiments indicate a challenging nature of the dataset when classifying using the detailed labeling scheme used in the corpus annotation, the accuracy substantially lacking behind human performance. However, when evaluating the models on a large scale paraphrase retrieval task on almost 400M candidate sentences, the results are highly encouraging, 29–53% of the pairs being ranked in the top 10 depending on the paraphrase type. The Turku Paraphrase Corpus is available at github.com/TurkuNLP/Turku-paraphrase-corpus as well as through the popular HuggingFace datasets under the CC-BY-SA license. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The introduction of ChatGPT by OpenAI has garnered significant attention. Among its capabilities, paraphrasing stands out. Objective: This study aims to investigate the satisfactory levels of plagiarism in the paraphrased text produced by this chatbot. Methods: Three texts of varying lengths were presented to ChatGPT. ChatGPT was then instructed to paraphrase the provided texts using five different prompts. In the subsequent stage of the study, the texts were divided into separate paragraphs, and ChatGPT was requested to paraphrase each paragraph individually. Lastly, in the third stage, ChatGPT was asked to paraphrase the texts it had previously generated. Results: The average plagiarism rate in the texts generated by ChatGPT was 45% (SD 10%). ChatGPT exhibited a substantial reduction in plagiarism for the provided texts (mean difference −0.51, 95% CI −0.54 to −0.48; P <.001). Furthermore, when comparing the second attempt with the initial attempt, a significant decrease in the plagiarism rate was observed (mean difference −0.06, 95% CI −0.08 to −0.03; P <.001). The number of paragraphs in the texts demonstrated a noteworthy association with the percentage of plagiarism, with texts consisting of a single paragraph exhibiting the lowest plagiarism rate (P <.001). Conclusion: Although ChatGPT demonstrates a notable reduction of plagiarism within texts, the existing levels of plagiarism remain relatively high. This underscores a crucial caution for researchers when incorporating this chatbot into their work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai, Philologia is the property of Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Many students who study English as a foreign language (EFL) often find it challenging to paraphrase while writing from source texts. Lacking such an ability can lead to different meanings as well as copying another person's ideas, words or work. However, little research has been done to integrate tool consultation to assist students in paraphrasing. To address this gap, this study explored whether guided tool consultation with paraphrasing strategy instruction can help students improve their overall paraphrasing performance. During an 18-week course, a class of students were trained to use three different e-tools to find synonyms: Microsoft Word thesaurus, Oxford Living Dictionaries synonyms (now called Thesaurus.com), and Linggle. Adopting a mixed-method approach, data sets included: pre-posttest drafts (summary writing), surveys, screen recordings, and interviews. The results showed significant differences between the pre- and post-tests. The majority of the lexical and phrasal paraphrases was suitable, while only a few were inaccurate. The students demonstrated the ability to consult the tools for changing synonyms and were able to apply taught strategies to restructure and restate the original sentences. Although students revealed different perceptions of the usefulness of the three tools for finding synonyms, they generally agreed that paraphrasing strategies combined with tool training were beneficial for learning. Pedagogical implications and research suggestions are provided based on the findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study attempts to explore the reflection of the connotative meanings in the translation of the Arabic lexical items qalil (few or little) and kathir (much or many) and their derivations from Arabic into English and Spanish. In order to conduct the study, some Qur’anic verses containing the two items are chosen, and two translations of the verses, English and Spanish, are selected to evaluate the portrayal of the connotative meanings of the two items in the translation. The study shows that the verses containing qalil and its derivations hold positive and favorable connotations and overtones, while the verses containing kathir and its derivations hold negative ones. It shows that the translation challenge of the antonymous lexical items qalil and kathir does not lie in their denotative meaning, but rather in the connotative one. It further reveals that lexical items can be concurrently antonymous at the denotative and connotative levels, a semantic fact that should be given enough attention in translation. The study concludes that since literal translation does not convey the various implications of lexical items, exegetic translation is suggested as an appropriate translation strategy to transfer these implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the typology of paraphrasing revolves around linguistic changes of paraphrasing, little is known about the importance of different types of linguistic changes and their relationship between paraphrasing performance and L2 proficiency. Empirical enquiry has focused on L2 writers' inappropriate paraphrasing performance against the norm of L1 writer, which is problematic in that L2 and L1 writers displayed considerable variation in paraphrasing. The present study drew upon 202 Chinese EFL writers' written responses in a paraphrasing test to look into the discrete linguistic transformations in paraphrasing and examine how the frequency of different linguistic changes in paraphrasing relates to their paraphrasing performance and L2 proficiency. Correlation analysis was run to analyze the relationship between the frequency of linguistic changes and paraphrasing performance. Multivariate analysis of variance analysis was conducted to examine how the frequency of linguistic changes relates to L2 proficiency. The findings revealed that Conceptual Transformation had the highest significant correlation with paraphrasing scores, followed by Lexical Transformation and then Syntactic Transformation. The frequency of Synonym Substitution, Morphology, Multiple Word Units, Phrase/Clause Shift, Active/Passive Shift and Conceptual Transformation increased as L2 writers' proficiency levels increased. Implications are drawn from the findings for paraphrasing instruction and assessment, research in paraphrasing and L2 writers' academic writing practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Humans are naturally endowed with the ability to write in a particular style. They can, for instance, rephrase a formal letter in an informal way, convey a literal message with the use of figures of speech or edit a novel by mimicking the style of some well-known authors. Automating this form of creativity constitutes the goal of style transfer. As a natural language generation task, style transfer aims at rewriting existing texts, and specifically, it creates paraphrases that exhibit some desired stylistic attributes. From a practical perspective, it envisions beneficial applications, like chatbots that modulate their communicative style to appear empathetic, or systems that automatically simplify technical articles for a non-expert audience. Several style-aware paraphrasing methods have attempted to tackle style transfer. A handful of surveys give a methodological overview of the field, but they do not support researchers to focus on specific styles. With this paper, we aim at providing a comprehensive discussion of the styles that have received attention in the transfer task. We organize them in a hierarchy, highlighting the challenges for the definition of each of them and pointing out gaps in the current research landscape. The hierarchy comprises two main groups. One encompasses styles that people modulate arbitrarily, along the lines of registers and genres. The other group corresponds to unintentionally expressed styles, due to an author's personal characteristics. Hence, our review shows how these groups relate to one another and where specific styles, including some that have not yet been explored, belong in the hierarchy. Moreover, we summarize the methods employed for different stylistic families, hinting researchers towards those that would be the most fitting for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One crucial skill to master by university students related to academic writing activity is paraphrasing skill. However, in Indonesian context, the university students still find paraphrasing challenging. Therefore, this study is intended to explore the use of read, reread, list, compose (RRLC) strategy to enhace the students’ paraphrasing skill in a college context. This study utilizes a qualitative case study design where the data were obtained through observation. The study revealed that RRLC stages can be implemented in learning activity. It engaged the students in activating their prior knowledge, doing an independent reading, discussing, and sharing their understanding about the text before paraphrasing. It assisted them to have better comprehension of the text to be paraphrased. In addition, during the implementation of composing stage in guided practice, the students’ paraphrased works indicated that the students were able to create sentences in different structures—active or passive constructions, use the synonyms, and retain the original meaning. These three skills helped them reduce the similiarity of their paraphrased works from the original version. This study recommends that RRLC strategy be implemented in teaching paraphrasing at college or lower level with some adjustments to meet the students’ basic English skill. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we examined how the explicit instructional use of paraphrasing guidelines can help international graduate students who are non-native English speakers to paraphrase information in text sources. This case study involved 14 graduate students enrolled in an academic writing class at a university in the northwest United States. Data were collected through seven sources: a background questionnaire, video of instruction, pretest, posttest, student task documents, stimulated recall interviews, and teacher interviews, which together addressed the three research questions. The data show that the participants' perceptions of using the guidelines were positive and that their paraphrases in the posttest had improved according to the guidelines. The study concludes that the use of the guidelines should be accompanied by meaningful support through explicit instruction and sufficient practice over time. The implications of this study include recommendations for paraphrasing instruction and future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ultimate purpose of this study is to advance the paraphrasing skill of the students from B2 to the C1 level based on the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) and to bring out the significance of a technology-integrated classroom. The existing studies focus on effective synchronous English language teaching but not extensively on teaching paraphrasing using new flanged technology. This is a quantitative study implemented on the heterogeneous adult learners, who belong to the age group of 19 to 25 using podcasts and zoom video conferencing. The researcher implied this experiment on 30 volunteered participants. The objective of this investigation is to encourage the use of technology and asynchronous classrooms in the modern era of teaching and learning the English language. The study is analysed with SmartPLS3. It is a software application with an innate graphical user interface for variance-based structural equation modelling (SEM). Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM) has been developed recently to handle data collection since it can operate productively with small sample sizes (Reinartz et al., 2009). The result shows the effectiveness of zoom video conferencing and podcasts through the improvement attained by the learners in the skill of paraphrasing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

High quality end-to-end speech translation model relies on a large scale of speech-to-text training data, which is usually scarce or even unavailable for some low-resource language pairs. To overcome this, we propose a target-side data augmentation method for low-resource language speech translation. In particular, we first generate large-scale target-side paraphrases based on a paraphrase generation model which incorporates several statistical machine translation (SMT) features and the commonly used recurrent neural network (RNN) feature. Then, a filtering model which consists of semantic similarity and speech–word pair co-occurrence was proposed to select the highest scoring source speech–target paraphrase pairs from candidates. Experimental results on English, Arabic, German, Latvian, Estonian, Slovenian and Swedish paraphrase generation show that the proposed method achieves significant and consistent improvements over several strong baseline models on PPDB datasets (http://paraphrase.org/). To introduce the results of paraphrase generation into the low-resource speech translation, we propose two strategies: audio–text pairs recombination and multiple references training. Experimental results show that the speech translation models trained on new audio–text datasets which combines the paraphrase generation results lead to substantial improvements over baselines, especially on low-resource languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a new linguistic resource for the generation of paraphrases in Portuguese, based on the lexicon-grammar framework. The resource components include: (i) a lexicon-grammar based dictionary of 2100 predicate nouns co-occurring with the support verb ser de 'be of', such as in ser de uma ajuda inestimável 'be of invaluable help'; (ii) a lexicon-grammar based dictionary of 6000 predicate nouns co-occurring with the support verb fazer 'do' or 'make', such as in fazer uma comparação 'make a comparison'; and (iii) a lexicon-grammar based dictionary of about 5000 human intransitive adjectives co-occurring with the copula verbs ser and/or estar 'be', such as in ser simpático 'be kind' or estar entusiasmado 'be enthusiastic'. A set of local grammars explore the properties described in linguistic resources, enabling a variety of text transformation tasks for paraphrasing applications. The paper highlights the different complementary and synergistic components and integration efforts, and presents some preliminary evaluation results on the inclusion of such resources in the eSPERTo paraphrase generation system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Paraphrasing is an act of generating similar text to the source text with different expressions. Paraphrase generation is an important task in various Natural Language Processing applications such as machine translation, question-answering, information retrieval and sentence simplification. The advancements in deep learning improved paraphrase generation. So, the aim of this paper is to provide a review from RNN based approaches to current state-of-the-art models. The current paraphrase generation techniques are using basic seq2seq with attention, neural machine translation, deep generative models and reinforcement learning methodologies. A comprehensive study is presented based on the methodology used, strengths of the systems and datasets used in these approaches. The paper will help the readers to know the basics of paraphrasing concepts, their types, various applications of paraphrase generation and the current algorithms developed for generating paraphrases. The various datasets for paraphrasing models are also explored along with future directions for scholars and persons from industry in the proposed article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Academic writing is one of the genres of writing which considered complex as it requires high language skills and the appropriate methodology in its production. One of the skills required is paraphrasing skills. However, paraphrasing is not an easy task especially if it involving a third language. Students may make various forms of errors in paraphrasing which need full attention, understanding, and techniques. Therefore, this study aims to identify the forms of mistakes and the weaknesses of students in making Arabic paraphrases, then, proposing method to address it. This study is a qualitative study and using samples taken from students' final coursework in the subject of Arabic for Academic (BAA4022). The corpus of the study involved 50 samples randomly selected among the students of the semester I session 2020/2021, Faculty of Major Language Studies (FPBU) and Faculty of Medicine & Health Sciences (FPSK), Islamic Science University of Malaysia (USIM). This sample was analysed using the content analysis method. The finding shows that the main errors of students in paraphrasing are comes from the semantic aspect due to weakness in understanding the original reference text. In addition, the errors from grammatical aspects, especially in the use of al-idhofah, the use of dhamir and fi'il are consequences of the weakness in mastery of syntax and Arabic morphology. Both of these forms of weaknesses affect the quality of paraphrases made especially in the aspect of semantic completeness. Thus, this study is hoped to provide enlightenment and helps teachers and students in strengthening the quality of writing academic papers in Arabic Language through the use of accurate and correct Arabic paraphrasing techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Source use competence is becoming increasingly important in English-medium universities, and inability to appropriately use reading sources leads to plagiarism which has serious punishable consequences. As one effective strategy to help academic writers to avoid plagiarism, paraphrasing is highly recommended for students to master. However, studies on paraphrasing are product-oriented, and few examined the processes and strategies of paraphrasing. The elusive construct of paraphrasing exerted a negative influence on the instruction and assessment of paraphrasing. Only specific paraphrasing strategies were examined in prior studies, and little has been done on more general strategies like cognitive and metacognitive strategies. Moreover, as for the studies of learner strategy and language performance, no consensus has been reached about the relationship between strategy use and language performance. Prior studies mainly adopted Purpura's questionnaire (1997) with cognitive and metacognitive strategies excluding other important learner strategies, and prior studies mainly examined language performance in non-integrated tasks. Questionnaire and interview were employed in previous studies, but few has adopted think-aloud protocols to capture test takers' online cognitive processes. To address the research gap, the present study purports to shed light on the cognitive processes and strategy use in the paraphrasing task with the method of think-aloud protocols and strategy use questionnaire. A total of 212 first-year non-English-major college students were recruited to respond to a seven-item paraphrasing task. Think-aloud protocol was conducted to capture test takers' thinking processes while responding to the task. In addition, test takers' strategy use in paraphrasing was elicited by a paraphrasing strategy use inventory. Findings of the study are as follows: test takers employed numerous strategies including cognitive, metacognitive, compensation, and affective strategies with a variety of sub-strategies; metacognitive strategies are significantly correlated with cognitive strategies; more proficient test takers used a smaller number of strategies and more metacognitive strategies. However, structural equation modeling analysis reported that all those strategies exert a negligible effect on participants' paraphrasing performance. Other factors which might contribute to the language performance were analyzed, including language knowledge, test methods, personal attributes, and errors of measurement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Acta Universitatis Lodziensis. Folia Litteraria Polonica is the property of Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Lodzkiego and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The importance of plagiarism in an academic setting cannot be overlooked. Creating an awareness of plagiarism avoidance amongst students may be achievable and teaching students certain skills to avoid plagiarism, like paraphrasing, may also be possible. Although paraphrasing is one of the most important skills for avoiding plagiarism, it is a real challenge, particularly for English second language students. Difficulties in paraphrasing arise from lack of English language proficiency and academic writing skills, as well as low reading comprehension. Writing centres were established at a number of universities in South Africa to help students develop their academic skills through appropriate interventions. Nevertheless, additional intervention strategies need to be implemented to help them avoid plagiarism. One such intervention, in the form of translation, was investigated at a rural university campus to test whether translation would reduce plagiarism amongst first-year students. A quantitative research approach was used to collect and analyse the data. Plagiarism in students' work was detected using manual evaluations and the TurnitinTM application. An intervention was carried out to develop students' skills in paraphrasing and inform them about plagiarism. This article describes the scaffolding process followed and reports on the results found after applying the translation method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The utility of paraphrasing and summarizing is key to effective academic writing. Both require that students have a good grasp of the source material not only in terms of understanding, analyzing, synthesizing, and evaluating the information found in the sources, but also in terms of selecting information, organizing, drafting, and revising their papers. Although several studies have identified L2 students' difficulties when utilizing paraphrasing and summarizing, this paper examines the cognitive and metacognitive aspects of these complex activities from the students' eyes. With essays from 120 freshman undergraduate students from a private university in Manila, this study qualitatively determined their reported difficulties when paraphrasing and summarizing, and the areas of improvements in these skills. Participant students identified four major areas of concern: 1) lack of proficiency in English, 2) poor reading comprehension skills, 3) lack of vocabulary and 4) lack of or poor documentation skills. Findings of this study provide grounds for presentation of pedagogical interventions/classroom instructions to address these students' reported difficulties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Specialists in the field of paraphrasing assure that awkward paraphrases often raise problems for readers and listeners in understanding what has been written or said in the original text. Such problems emerge when the paraphraser fails to convey the exact meaning of the source text. Anyhow, bad paraphrasing changes and damages the real meaning of the source text. Any increase or decrease in paraphrasing will affect negatively the meaning of the main text. In other words, bad paraphrasing affects negatively the receptor who can easily see the semantic differences between the paraphrased text and the source one . The procedure to be followed in this paper is presentation of the available literature relative to the subject of paraphrasing. The researchers have put their own views and comments on the subject. Besides, the available literature which has strong relationship to paraphrasing, such as plagiarism, note-taking, summary making etc. is presented with conclusions arrived at listed by the end of this study. This study is anticipated to be of use to researchers, scholars, teachers of English, i.e., the significance of this paper is clearly manifested in its advantage for teachers and researchers for pedagogical purposes in their instructional duties. The researchers of this paper, however, believe that the subject of paraphrasing is a significant one which deserves the effort exerted on it . The aim of this study is to supply the reader with a convenient and detailed insight into the subject "paraphrasing" with relative topics mentioned previously and to offer solutions to the difficulties which face the scholars and the researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are two main theories of ontological commitment: the quantifier view, and the truthmaker view. Since there are some truths that apparently commit us to certain entities, but actually do not, any ontological commitment theory must also contain an ontological reduction theory. Advocates of the quantifier view propose the paraphrasing method of reduction, while some advocates of the truthmaker view propose the supervenience method. In this paper, after a brief discussion of the quantifier view, the author proposes a modified version of truthmaker-based ontology, and shows that a plausible account of the supervenience method can be deduced from his version. He then shows that the supervenience method could explain why the paraphrasing method is successful. The author also argues that according to the truthmaker view we must accept composite objects as something over and above the particles which constitute them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Respeaking is a method of producing subtitling for live events and TV programmes. Respeakers repeat speakers’ utterances so that they may be changed by speech recognition software into subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing. Respeakers need to paraphrase the text so that it conforms with temporal and spatial constraints of subtitling. Due to the similarities between respeaking, interpreting and translation, we tested interpreters, translators and bilingual controls on a paraphrasing task to see whether interpreters or translators would manifest any advantage thanks to experience. Following respeaking training, the participants were asked to paraphrase sentences with semantic redundancies, oral discourse markers and false starts in a simultaneous and delayed condition. Contrary to our predictions, we found that experience did not modulate paraphrasing quality or speed in general, but interpreters did outperform other groups when eliminating semantic redundancies, which were also the most difficult reformulations to tackle for all participants. The data suggest that while interpreters and translators are not better predisposed to become respeakers than regular bilinguals, at least as regards the paraphrasing performance, certain aspects of the interpreting experience (the need to express meaning concisely within time constraints) may offer a slight advantage in producing well-formed respoken subtitles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract The task of recognizing and generating paraphrases is an essential component in many Arabic natural language processing (NLP) applications. A well-established machine translation approach for automatically extracting paraphrases, leverages bilingual corpora to find the equivalent meaning of phrases in a single language, is performed by "pivoting" over a shared translation in another language. Neural machine translation has recently become a viable alternative approach to the more widely-used statistical machine translation. In this paper, we revisit bilingual pivoting in the context of neural machine translation and present a paraphrasing model based mainly on neural networks. Our model describes paraphrases in a continuous space and generates candidate paraphrases for an Arabic source input. Experimental results across datasets confirm that neural paraphrases significantly outperform those obtained with statistical machine translation, in particular the Google translator, and indicate high similarity correlation between our model and human translation, making our model attractive for real-world deployment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on one's comprehension and interpretation of the original text, paraphrasing goes beyond a faithful account of the source text. Differing from previous research which has mostly focused on students' re-use of the source text, this study explores whether and how students paraphrase to express their own views. We examined 192 paraphrases identified by 18 advanced graduate students in their academic papers across disciplines at a North American university. Analyses of students' writing, their sources, and their own accounts present an exposition of writers' thinking and processes of paraphrasing featuring various types of linguistic adaptations and content recontextualization. The study suggests that paraphrasing by these advanced graduate students is a process of smoothly integrating the source information into the new text by syntactically restructuring, interpreting and recounting only the source text with relevance to the new text. During the process, the writer sometimes paraphrases to incorporate information in the immediate source text with that gained from prior readings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Paraphrasing is based on one's comprehension and interpretation of the source text (e.g., Yamada, 2003). It is not clear, however, how English as a Second/Foreign Language (ESL/EFL) students paraphrase to project their individual views in their research papers when writing in English or their home language. This study compares the Chinese and English paraphrasing of 17 graduate students who speak Chinese as their first language. The participants (12 from a Chinese university and 5 from a North American university) identified 117 paraphrases (66 Chinese and 51 English) from their research papers and explained how they paraphrased each example. The Chinese paraphrases were found to contain significantly more textual borrowing from the matching source text than the English paraphrases. The former were not all acknowledged but the latter were. There were also a total of 80 mentions of content recontextualization (55 Chinese and 25 English). These mentions featured selecting information in the English paraphrases (24, 96%), compared with using the citer's own interpretations (17, 31%) and additional ideas (22, 40%) in the Chinese paraphrases. Implications of these cross-cultural differences are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the potential effect of an eight-week e-mail- and WhatsApp-based instructional treatment on 45 Jordanian EFL tenth-grade students' paraphrasing and summarizing skills. Three instruments were used for data collection: a pre-test, a post-test, and an interview schedule. The findings reveal statistically significant differences (at a= 0.05) in the participants' mean scores on the post-test in favor of those in the WhatsApp group, combined e-mail and WhatsApp group, and e-mail group, respectively. The findings also reveal that the treatment has a significantly higher effect of on paraphrasing than on summarizing. Several pedagogical implications and recommendations are put forth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of "RAP" [RAP is a three-step strategy: Read-Ask-Put], a paraphrasing cognitive strategy training, associated with a self-regulatory model, on the development of reading comprehension among fourth-grade students. All participants were selected on the basis of initial reading comprehension measures and consisted of three male students who were identified as being at a frustration-level reading. A multiple-probe design across participants was used. As a result, the participants showed significant improvements in the text recall and an enhancement their reading comprehension skills. Two of the participants were able to maintain their improvements and generalized each step of the strategy in the "RAP" to different content-area texts. The remaining participant made remarkable improvements with respect to the baseline phase, but did not maintain and generalize the strategy. Suggestions were made for improving future research investigating the effects of RAP paraphrasing strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The spectacular rise of the Internet and the associated 'copy-paste culture' of generation Y students have brought plagiarism to greater public attention since the late 1990s. Studies reported in numerous academic articles have found that many students commit plagiarism either unwittingly or from lack of skill. This article aims firstly to show that plagiarism is often caused by pedagogical shortcomings due to the difficulty of defining plagiarism accurately. It shows how popular definitions of plagiarism actually overlap with the lower levels of taxonomies of learning and how the concepts of novelty, paraphrasing and application of information are context-sensitive in academia. An attempt is made to define plagiarism anew and a questionnaire that was distributed to 17 000 students and 810 staff members at the North-West University is used to identify the different perceptions of students and staff in defining plagiarism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study aimed to identify difficulties in writing at the beginning of educational science programmes in the Finnish Open University by analysing the students’ written argumentation and use of sources at the textual level. The data were analysed using qualitative content analysis. The results showed that many students began their educational studies with weak writing competencies. While many of the problems were directly related to students’ failure to explain the ideas in their sources in their own words, some problems pertained to other aspects, such as the inability to construct convincing arguments. Understanding the nature of the problems in writing encountered by beginning students in educational sciences can help teachers foster students’ participation in academic discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Reading comprehension is important for academic success and is a skill required for many activities in school and beyond. With the implementation of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), many teachers have reported feeling overwhelmed by the expectations that reading and writing skills should be emphasized, taught, and supported in the content area classroom. This article discusses how to teach a paraphrasing strategy using the self-regulated strategy development (SRSD) model in content area texts to support the development of comprehension skills. The strategy can easily be incorporated into existing curriculum as a support for a variety of readers who struggle with comprehension and aligns well with the CCSS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A casual comment by a student alerted the authors to the existence and prevalence of Internet-based paraphrasing tools. A subsequent quick Google search highlighted the broad range and availability of online paraphrasing tools which offer free 'services' to paraphrase large sections of text ranging from sentences, paragraphs, whole articles, book chapters or previously written assignments. The ease of access to online paraphrasing tools provides the potential for students to submit work they have not directly written themselves, or in the case of academics and other authors, to rewrite previously published materials to sidestep self-plagiarism. Students placing trust in online paraphrasing tools as an easy way of complying with the requirement for originality in submissions are at risk in terms of the quality of the output generated and possibly of not achieving the learning outcomes as they may not fully understand the information they have compiled. There are further risks relating to the legitimacy of the outputs in terms of academic integrity and plagiarism. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the existence, development, use and detection of use of Internet based paraphrasing tools. To demonstrate the dangers in using paraphrasing tools an experiment was conducted using some easily accessible Internet-based paraphrasing tools to process part of an existing publication. Two sites are compared to demonstrate the types of differences that exist in the quality of the output from certain paraphrasing algorithms, and the present poor performance of online originality checking services such as Turnitin® to identify and link material processed via machine based paraphrasing tools. The implications for student skills in paraphrasing, academic integrity and the clues to assist staff in identifying the use of online paraphrasing tools are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most current translation memory (TM) systems work on the string level (character or word level) and lack semantic knowledge while matching. They use simple edit-distance (ED) calculated on the surface form or some variation on it (stem, lemma), which does not take into consideration any semantic aspects in matching. This paper presents a novel and efficient approach to incorporating semantic information in the form of paraphrasing (PP) in the ED metric. The approach computes ED while efficiently considering paraphrases using dynamic programming and greedy approximation. In addition to using automatic evaluation metrics like BLEU and METEOR, we have carried out an extensive human evaluation in which we measured post-editing time, keystrokes, HTER, HMETEOR, and carried out three rounds of subjective evaluations. Our results show that PP substantially improves TM matching and retrieval, resulting in translation performance increases when translators use paraphrase-enhanced TMs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reading comprehension is important for academic success and is a skill required for many activities in school and beyond. This study investigated the effects of the TRAP (Think before you read, Read a paragraph, Ask myself, “What was this paragraph mostly about?” and Put it into my own words) paraphrasing strategy taught using the Self-Regulated Strategy Development model. Participants were seven middle school students identified as fluent readers who experienced difficulty with comprehension. All instruction for the participants was in pairs or small groups. Results indicate that the TRAP strategy increased reading comprehension as measured by the percentage of text recall and short-answer questions. Ideas for future research and implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The study aims to examine the paraphrasing strategies, sources, and self-plagiarism of 71 journal articles in the fields of language and education. Turnitin plagiarism detection software and human scrutiny were employed to uncover the full range of detectable text-borrowing practices in these publications. The results indicate 30 different types of paraphrasing strategies, among which copying verbatim and substitution were the most frequent. Additionally, authors in the study often integrated multiple paraphrasing strategies within single sentences. Journal articles represent the majority of the sources from which text is borrowed. Regarding authorship, overall, more than two-thirds (67.28%) of the observed textual borrowing involves the reuse (or recycling) of texts from an author's previous publications. The prevalence of matches with one's own publications calls for more explicit operational standards among disciplines in this regard and points toward factors that may contribute to unintentional self-plagiarism, such as lexical bundles or authors' stylistic habits in writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Paraphrase corpora annotated with the types of paraphrases they contain constitute an essential resource for the understanding of the phenomenon of paraphrasing and the improvement of paraphrase-related systems in natural language processing. In this article, a new annotation scheme for paraphrase-type annotation is set out, together with newly created measures for the computation of inter-annotator agreement. Three corpora different in nature and in two languages have been annotated using this infrastructure. The annotation results and the inter-annotator agreement scores for these corpora are proof of the adequacy and robustness of our proposal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This qualitative study investigates students' perceptions about paraphrasing and their cognitive and meta-cognitive processes in paraphrasing. Four Indonesian advanced EFL students enrolled in Applied Linguistics course of a graduate program in English Language Teaching of a state university in Malang were voluntarily willing to participate in the study. These four subjects did a paraphrasing task requiring them to do concurrent verbal reports while paraphrasing three sentences and one paragraph. Following this, the subjects responded to a questionnaire and then participated in a retrospective interview. The data from the questionnaires were described qualitatively, whereas the verbal reports were transcribed and analyzed for identification of cognitive and meta-cognitive strategies based on the framework of learning strategies by Chamot and Kupper (1989). The subjects' perceptions about paraphrasing appeared to be in line with the widely accepted definition and criteria of proper paraphrases. Additionally, the results of verbal reports show that the subjects used 21 cognitive and seven meta-cognitive strategies, reflecting the fact that most of the cognitive strategies used in the sentence level were applied in the paragraph level with some additions of strategies specific to paragraph development and synthesis such as finding the main idea and summarizing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the importance of paraphrasing as part of the process of comprehension for college students, this study assessed the level of implementation of text analysis and paraphrasing in the responses of a sample of undergraduate psychology majors. We selected a group of freshmen, who were asked to answer a questionnaire and write a summary of an empirical article. The results indicate that participants possess low levels of both text analysis and paraphrasing. It was seen that verbatim text copying prevailed; nevertheless, possibilities for structuring a training workshop were discerned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A survey was conducted to investigate the perceptions of teachers regarding students' comprehension in English and about their attitude to reading comprehension. For this purpose a total of 50 teachers (25 males & 25 females) were selected as sample of the study. A questionnaire containing 12 items was constructed and administered on the selected sample. The collected data was tabulated, analyzed and interpreted by chi- square statistics. The results showed that the given text is understood by the students, students found main theme, students apply reading comprehension strategies, used relaxation exercise, paraphrasing helped the students' in an increase their comprehension ability, students; previous knowledge restructured by subjecting them to valuable and stout notions, and self - questioning is helpful in examining and evaluating ideas and knowledge. In short, the students of Pakistan dwells in a multi - lingual society and teachers about English are feeble and weak in most cases which causes impedes in obtaining the desired and planned achievements in this very subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to investigate what types of paraphrasing are the most and the least frequently attempted by Korean L2 writers and to examine whether the tendency is affected by L2 writers' English proficiency. A total of 50 summary protocols were collected from 50 college students and analyzed through the discourse analysis program, CLAN. It has been found that when attempting to paraphrase, Korean L2 summary writers tend to resort to minimal modification such as deleting, adding, or replacing vocabulary using synonyms; they are reluctant to modify substantially by combining or transforming sentence structures. The frequency of using more substantial syntactic modification increases as their proficiency improves. However, the overall tendency still remains that syntactic modification is much less used than lexical modification across the differing proficiency groups. Thus, instruction of paraphrasing skills is recommended particularly for less proficient L2 writers since it encourages them to use syntactic and lexical knowledge for communicative purposes. It is also suggested that paraphrasing tasks will be valid writing tasks for assessing syntactic and lexical knowledge in use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Academic plagiarism and inappropriate source borrowing have drawn much attention in higher education in recent years. Research has shown that reasons behind students' textual transgression include lack of knowledge about plagiarism and paraphrasing, task/text difficulty, and topical familiarity. Little has been done to probe into the relationship between source text readability and paraphrasing. The study aims to explore if text readability has an influence on the extent of student writers' paraphrasing, plagiarism, and their strategy use. The participants of the study were 97 college students taking academic writing courses in Taiwan. This study employed one specially developed instrument that includes a plagiarism knowledge survey, a perception survey, and two paraphrasing tasks with low-and high-readability texts. The results showed that students tended to do more substantial paraphrasing from the high-readability text than from the low-readability text. Also, incidences of potential plagiarism such as exact copying and near copying appeared to be higher for the low-readability text than the high-readability text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To address the issue of plagiarism, students in two undergraduate Research Methods and Analysis courses conducted, analyzed, and wrote up original research on the topic of plagiarism. Students in an otherwise identical course completed the same assignments but examined a different research topic. At the start and end of the semester, all students (n = 44) completed a homework assignment assessing plagiarism knowledge and paraphrasing skills. Students in the plagiarism-themed courses showed improvement in both knowledge and skills, and the strategies they suggested for avoiding plagiarism became more sophisticated as did the reasons for avoiding plagiarism. The control group did not show the same improvements. Results suggest repeated hands-on exposure to the topic of plagiarism improves plagiarism avoidance and understanding. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We introduce novel paraphrasing rules for Japanese light verb constructions (LVCs) that reduce the differences in the surface forms while retaining several of the crucial syntactic/semantic functions of these light verbs. An analysis of the linguistic properties of light verbs allows us to create paraphrasing patterns that map 151 different light verbs into 10 simple forms. Of these 10 forms, 7 convert complex noun-particle-verb structures into simple predicative forms. By constructing a list of 923 examples for ambiguous light verbs, we show that we can correctly distinguish real LVCs from those in which the light verbs were actually functioning as a main verb. The results of experiments indicate that our paraphrasing rules offer high accuracy. The experiments also reveal that our paraphrasing system works as a normalizer of complex predicates, which improves the recall rate of the predicate extraction task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Plagiarism is growing at rampant rate due to available internet and the growing tendency of wrong practices of hiding the undocumented or documented sources. In academic institutions, plagiarism poses a threat to both students and instructors that ultimately leads to common plagiarism undetected, lost grants or public resources with over all poor quality. A step-by-step approach is proposed to avoid plagiarism for students by correct paraphrasing and quoting the words, sentences and paragraphs piece by piece to give the appropriate credit to the author with existing work of its original author. This approach will avoid the parallel or reproduction of material inappropriately used in any way (plagiarism prevention and detection). Several examples are cited from documented websites of leading universities and institutions to make new freshman students aware of plagiarism and methods to avoid it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines skillful EFL writers' and less skillful writers' EFL performance and perceptions of paraphrasing and inappropriate text borrowing, the extent to which their performance matches perceptions, and the factors behind their problematic text borrowing. Ninety-five postgraduates and undergraduates in Taiwan accomplished a paraphrasing task and completed a questionnaire. The findings revealed a mismatch between the participants' behaviors and perceptions. The participants tended to deny having committed plagiarism and claimed they were aware of the importance of paraphrasing. However, such belief has contrasted sharply with their actual behaviors in the paraphrasing task in which both postgraduates and undergraduates failed to produce acceptable texts. The reasons for this included not having explicitly learned paraphrasing, unsuccessful transfer of paraphrasing knowledge to writing due to a lack of experience and practice, and the influence of their citation practice in Chinese writing. In addition, the undergraduates plagiarized more strings of words than the graduate students did. The possible reasons for this could include the undergraduates' less sufficient metacognitive knowledge and strategies, as well as their immature cognitive development. This study suggests that to raise EFL students' awareness of and performance in paraphrasing, improving their English proficiency and metacognition, and practice on paraphrasing are necessary in EFL writing classes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]