On the use of word embedding for cross language plagiarism detection

[EN] Cross language plagiarism is the unacknowledged reuse of text across language pairs. It occurs if a passage of text is translated from source language to target language and no proper citation is provided. Although various methods have been developed for detection of cross language plagiarism, less attention has been paid to measure and compare their performance, especially when tackling with different types of paraphrasing through translation. In this paper, we investigate various approaches to cross language plagiarism detection. Moreover, we present a novel approach to cross language plagiarism detection using word embedding methods and explore its performance against other state-of-the-art plagiarism detection algorithms. In order to evaluate the methods, we have constructed an English-Persian bilingual plagiarism detection corpus (referred to as HAMTA-CL) comprised of seven types of obfuscation. The results show that the word embedding approach outperforms the other approaches with respect to recall when encountering heavily paraphrased passages. On the other hand, translation based approach performs well when the precision is the main consideration of the cross language plagiarism detection system.Asghari, H.; Fatemi, O.; Mohtaj, S.; Faili, H.; Rosso, P. (2019). On the use of word embedding for cross language plagiarism detection. Intelligent Data Analysis. 23(3):661-680. https://doi.org/10.3233/IDA-183985S661680233H. Asghari, K. Khoshnava, O. Fatemi and H. Faili, Developing bilingual plagiarism detection corpus using sentence aligned parallel corpus: Notebook for {PAN} at {CLEF} 2015, In L. Cappellato, N. Ferro, G.J.F. Jones and E. SanJuan, editors, Working Notes of {CLEF} 2015 – Conference and Labs of the Evaluation forum, Toulouse, France, September 8–11, 2015, volume 1391 of {CEUR} Workshop Proceedings, CEUR-WS.org, 2015.A. Barrón-Cede no, M. Potthast, P. Rosso and B. Stein, Corpus and evaluation measures for automatic plagiarism detection, In N. Calzolari, K. Choukri, B. Maegaard, J. Mariani, J. Odijk, S. Piperidis, M. Rosner and D. Tapias, editors, Proceedings of the International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, {LREC} 2010, 17–23 May 2010, Valletta, Malta. European Language Resources Association, 2010.A. Barrón-Cede no, P. Rosso, D. Pinto and A. Juan, On cross-lingual plagiarism analysis using a statistical model, In B. Stein, E. Stamatatos and M. Koppel, editors, Proceedings of the ECAI’08 Workshop on Uncovering Plagiarism, Authorship and Social Software Misuse, Patras, Greece, July 22, 2008, volume 377 of {CEUR} Workshop Proceedings. CEUR-WS.org, 2008.Farghaly, A., & Shaalan, K. (2009). Arabic Natural Language Processing. ACM Transactions on Asian Language Information Processing, 8(4), 1-22. doi:10.1145/1644879.1644881J. Ferrero, F. Agnès, L. Besacier and D. Schwab, A multilingual, multi-style and multi-granularity dataset for cross-language textual similarity detection, In N. Calzolari, K. Choukri, T. Declerck, S. Goggi, M. Grobelnik, B. Maegaard, J. Mariani, H. Mazo, A. Moreno, J. Odijk and S. Piperidis, editors, Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation {LREC} 2016, Portorož, Slovenia, May 23–28, 2016, European Language Resources Association {(ELRA)}, 2016.Franco-Salvador, M., Gupta, P., Rosso, P., & Banchs, R. E. (2016). Cross-language plagiarism detection over continuous-space- and knowledge graph-based representations of language. Knowledge-Based Systems, 111, 87-99. doi:10.1016/j.knosys.2016.08.004Franco-Salvador, M., Rosso, P., & Montes-y-Gómez, M. (2016). A systematic study of knowledge graph analysis for cross-language plagiarism detection. Information Processing & Management, 52(4), 550-570. doi:10.1016/j.ipm.2015.12.004C.K. Kent and N. Salim, Web based cross language plagiarism detection, CoRR, abs/0912.3, 2009.McNamee, P., & Mayfield, J. (2004). Character N-Gram Tokenization for European Language Text Retrieval. Information Retrieval, 7(1/2), 73-97. doi:10.1023/b:inrt.0000009441.78971.beT. Mikolov, K. Chen, G. Corrado and J. Dean, Efficient estimation of word representations in vector space, CoRR, abs/1301.3, 2013.S. Mohtaj, B. Roshanfekr, A. Zafarian and H. Asghari, Parsivar: A language processing toolkit for persian, In N. Calzolari, K. Choukri, C. Cieri, T. Declerck, S. Goggi, K. Hasida, H. Isahara, B. Maegaard, J. Mariani, H. Mazo, A. Moreno, J. Odijk, S. Piperidis and T. Tokunaga, editors, Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2018, Miyazaki, Japan, May 7–12, 2018, European Language Resources Association ELRA, 2018.R.M.A. Nawab, M. Stevenson and P.D. Clough, University of Sheffield – Lab Report for {PAN} at {CLEF} 2010, In M. Braschler, D. Harman and E. Pianta, editors, {CLEF} 2010 LABs and Workshops, Notebook Papers, 22–23 September 2010, Padua, Italy, volume 1176 of {CEUR} Workshop Proceedings, CEUR-WS.org, 2010.G. Oberreuter, G. L’Huillier, S.A. Rios and J.D. Velásquez, Approaches for intrinsic and external plagiarism detection – Notebook for {PAN} at {CLEF} 2011, In V. Petras, P. Forner and P.D. Clough, editors, {CLEF} 2011 Labs and Workshop, Notebook Papers, 19–22 September 2011, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, volume 1177 of {CEUR} Workshop Proceedings, CEUR-WS.org, 2011.Pinto, D., Civera, J., Barrón-Cedeño, A., Juan, A., & Rosso, P. (2009). A statistical approach to crosslingual natural language tasks. Journal of Algorithms, 64(1), 51-60. doi:10.1016/j.jalgor.2009.02.005M. Potthast, A. Barrón-Cede no, A. Eiselt, B. Stein and P. Rosso, Overview of the 2nd international competition on plagiarism detection, In M. Braschler, D. Harman and E. Pianta, editors, {CLEF} 2010 LABs and Workshops, Notebook Papers, 22–23 September 2010, Padua, Italy, volume 1176 of {CEUR} Workshop Proceedings, CEUR-WS.org, 2010.Potthast, M., Barrón-Cedeño, A., Stein, B., & Rosso, P. (2010). Cross-language plagiarism detection. Language Resources and Evaluation, 45(1), 45-62. doi:10.1007/s10579-009-9114-zM. Potthast, A. Eiselt, A. Barrón-Cede no, B. Stein and P. Rosso, Overview of the 3rd international competition on plagiarism detection, In V. Petras, P. Forner and P.D. Clough, editors, {CLEF} 2011 Labs and Workshop, Notebook Papers, 19–22 September 2011, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, volume 1177 of {CEUR} Workshop Proceedings. CEUR-WS.org, 2011.M. Potthast, S. Goering, P. Rosso and B. Stein, Towards data submissions for shared tasks: First experiences for the task of text alignment, In L. Cappellato, N. Ferro, G.J.F. Jones and E. SanJuan, editors, Working Notes of {CLEF} 2015 – Conference and Labs of the Evaluation forum, Toulouse, France, September 8–11, 2015, volume 1391 of {CEUR} Workshop Proceedings, CEUR-WS.org, 2015.Potthast, M., Stein, B., & Anderka, M. (s. f.). A Wikipedia-Based Multilingual Retrieval Model. Advances in Information Retrieval, 522-530. doi:10.1007/978-3-540-78646-7_51B. Pouliquen, R. Steinberger and C. Ignat, Automatic identification of document translations in large multilingual document collections, CoRR, abs/cs/060, 2006.B. Stein, E. Stamatatos and M. Koppel, Proceedings of the ECAI’08 Workshop on Uncovering Plagiarism, Authorship and Social Software Misuse, Patras, Greece, July 22, 2008, volume 377 of {CEUR} Workshop Proceedings, CEUR-WS.org, 2008.J. Wieting, M. Bansal, K. Gimpel and K. Livescu, Towards universal paraphrastic sentence embeddings, CoRR, abs/1511.0, 2015.V. Zarrabi, J. Rafiei, K. Khoshnava, H. Asghari and S. Mohtaj, Evaluation of text reuse corpora for text alignment task of plagiarism detection, In L. Cappellato, N. Ferro, G.J.F. Jones and E. SanJuan, editors, Working Notes of {CLEF} 2015 – Conference and Labs of the Evaluation forum, Toulouse, France, September 8–11, 2015, volume 1391 of {CEUR} Workshop Proceedings, CEUR-WS.org, 2015.Barrón-Cedeño, A., Gupta, P., & Rosso, P. (2013). Methods for cross-language plagiarism detection. Knowledge-Based Systems, 50, 211-217. doi:10.1016/j.knosys.2013.06.01

Plagiarism Detection Techniques for Arabic Script Languages: A Literature Review

Plagiarism is generally defined as literary theft and academic dishonesty. This considered as the serious issue in an academic documents and texts. There are numerous of plagiarism detection techniques have been developed for various natural languages, mainly English. In this paper we investigate and review the plagiarism detection techniques and algorithms which have been developed for Arabic Script Languages (ASL), and providing a literature review of the utilized methods in terms of techniques and outcomes.  The result of this paper will help the researchers who are going to commence their development and extend their researches in ASL like Arabic, Persian, Urdu, and Kurdish

Plagiarism detection for Indonesian texts

As plagiarism becomes an increasing concern for Indonesian universities and research centers, the need of using automatic plagiarism checker is becoming more real. However, researches on Plagiarism Detection Systems (PDS) in Indonesian documents have not been well developed, since most of them deal with detecting duplicate or near-duplicate documents, have not addressed the problem of retrieving source documents, or show tendency to measure document similarity globally. Therefore, systems resulted from these researches are incapable of referring to exact locations of ``similar passage'' pairs. Besides, there has been no public and standard corpora available to evaluate PDS in Indonesian texts. To address the weaknesses of former researches, this thesis develops a plagiarism detection system which executes various methods of plagiarism detection stages in a workflow system. In retrieval stage, a novel document feature coined as phraseword is introduced and executed along with word unigram and character n-grams to address the problem of retrieving source documents, whose contents are copied partially or obfuscated in a suspicious document. The detection stage, which exploits a two-step paragraph-based comparison, is aimed to address the problems of detecting and locating source-obfuscated passage pairs. The seeds for matching source-obfuscated passage pairs are based on locally-weighted significant terms to capture paraphrased and summarized passages. In addition to this system, an evaluation corpus was created through simulation by human writers, and by algorithmic random generation. Using this corpus, the performance evaluation of the proposed methods was performed in three scenarios. On the first scenario which evaluated source retrieval performance, some methods using phraseword and token features were able to achieve the optimum recall rate 1. On the second scenario which evaluated detection performance, our system was compared to Alvi's algorithm and evaluated in 4 levels of measures: character, passage, document, and cases. The experiment results showed that methods resulted from using token as seeds have higher scores than Alvi's algorithm in all 4 levels of measures both in artificial and simulated plagiarism cases. In case detection, our systems outperform Alvi's algorithm in recognizing copied, shaked, and paraphrased passages. However, Alvi's recognition rate on summarized passage is insignificantly higher than our system. The same tendency of experiment results were demonstrated on the third experiment scenario, only the precision rates of Alvi's algorithm in character and paragraph levels are higher than our system. The higher Plagdet scores produced by some methods in our system than Alvi's scores show that this study has fulfilled its objective in implementing a competitive state-of-the-art algorithm for detecting plagiarism in Indonesian texts. Being run at our test document corpus, Alvi's highest scores of recall, precision, Plagdet, and detection rate on no-plagiarism cases correspond to its scores when it was tested on PAN'14 corpus. Thus, this study has contributed in creating a standard evaluation corpus for assessing PDS for Indonesian documents. Besides, this study contributes in a source retrieval algorithm which introduces phrasewords as document features, and a paragraph-based text alignment algorithm which relies on two different strategies. One of them is to apply local-word weighting used in text summarization field to select seeds for both discriminating paragraph pair candidates and matching process. The proposed detection algorithm results in almost no multiple detection. This contributes to the strength of this algorithm

Measuring Semantic Relatedness Using Salient Encyclopedic Concepts

While pragmatics, through its integration of situational awareness and real world relevant knowledge, offers a high level of analysis that is suitable for real interpretation of natural dialogue, semantics, on the other end, represents a lower yet more tractable and affordable linguistic level of analysis using current technologies. Generally, the understanding of semantic meaning in literature has revolved around the famous quote ``You shall know a word by the company it keeps''. In this thesis we investigate the role of context constituents in decoding the semantic meaning of the engulfing context; specifically we probe the role of salient concepts, defined as content-bearing expressions which afford encyclopedic definitions, as a suitable source of semantic clues to an unambiguous interpretation of context. Furthermore, we integrate this world knowledge in building a new and robust unsupervised semantic model and apply it to entail semantic relatedness between textual pairs, whether they are words, sentences or paragraphs. Moreover, we explore the abstraction of semantics across languages and utilize our findings into building a novel multi-lingual semantic relatedness model exploiting information acquired from various languages. We demonstrate the effectiveness and the superiority of our mono-lingual and multi-lingual models through a comprehensive set of evaluations on specialized synthetic datasets for semantic relatedness as well as real world applications such as paraphrase detection and short answer grading. Our work represents a novel approach to integrate world-knowledge into current semantic models and a means to cross the language boundary for a better and more robust semantic relatedness representation, thus opening the door for an improved abstraction of meaning that carries the potential of ultimately imparting understanding of natural language to machines

Tracking the Temporal-Evolution of Supernova Bubbles in Numerical Simulations

The study of low-dimensional, noisy manifolds embedded in a higher dimensional space has been extremely useful in many applications, from the chemical analysis of multi-phase flows to simulations of galactic mergers. Building a probabilistic model of the manifolds has helped in describing their essential properties and how they vary in space. However, when the manifold is evolving through time, a joint spatio-temporal modelling is needed, in order to fully comprehend its nature. We propose a first-order Markovian process that propagates the spatial probabilistic model of a manifold at fixed time, to its adjacent temporal stages. The proposed methodology is demonstrated using a particle simulation of an interacting dwarf galaxy to describe the evolution of a cavity generated by a Supernov

Integrating State-of-the-art NLP Tools into Existing Methods to Address Current Challenges in Plagiarism Detection

Paraphrase plagiarism occurs when text is deliberately obfuscated to evade detection, deliberate alteration increases the complexity of plagiarism and the difficulty in detecting paraphrase plagiarism. In paraphrase plagiarism, copied texts often contain little or no matching words, and conventional plagiarism detectors, most of which are designed to detect matching stings are ineffective under such condition. The problem of plagiarism detection has been widely researched in recent years with significant progress made particularly in the platform of Pan@Clef competition on plagiarism detection. However further research is required specifically in the area of paraphrase and translation (obfuscation) plagiarism detection as studies show that the state-of-the-art is unsatisfactory. A rational solution to the problem is to apply models that detect plagiarism using semantic features in texts, rather than matching strings. Deep contextualised learning models (DCLMs) have the ability to learn deep textual features that can be used to compare text for semantic similarity. They have been remarkably effective in many natural language processing (NLP) tasks, but have not yet been tested in paraphrase plagiarism detection. The second problem facing conventional plagiarism detection is translation plagiarism, which occurs when copied text is translated to a different language and sometimes paraphrased and used without acknowledging the original sources. The most common method used for detecting cross-lingual plagiarism (CLP) require internet translation services, which is limiting to the detection process in many ways. A rational solution to the problem is to use detection models that do not utilise internet translation services. In this thesis we addressed these ongoing challenges facing conventional plagiarism detection by applying some of the most advanced methods in NLP, which includes contextualised and non-contextualised deep learning models. To address the problem of paraphrased plagiarism, we proposed a novel paraphrase plagiarism detector that integrates deep contextualised learning (DCL) into a generic plagiarism detection framework. Evaluation results revealed that our proposed paraphrase detector outperformed a state-of-art model, and a number of standard baselines in the task of paraphrase plagiarism detection. With respect to CLP detection, we propose a novel multilingual translation model (MTM) based on the Word2Vec (word embedding) model that can effectively translate text across a number of languages, it is independent of the internet and performs comparably, and in many cases better than a common cross-lingual plagiarism detection model that rely on online machine translator. The MTM does not require parallel or comparable corpora, it is therefore designed to resolve the problem of CLPD in low resource languages. The solutions provided in this research advance the state-of-the-art and contribute to the existing body of knowledge in plagiarism detection, and would also have a positive impact on academic integrity that has been under threat for a while by plagiarism

Plagiarism detection for Indonesian texts

As plagiarism becomes an increasing concern for Indonesian universities and research centers, the need of using automatic plagiarism checker is becoming more real. However, researches on Plagiarism Detection Systems (PDS) in Indonesian documents have not been well developed, since most of them deal with detecting duplicate or near-duplicate documents, have not addressed the problem of retrieving source documents, or show tendency to measure document similarity globally. Therefore, systems resulted from these researches are incapable of referring to exact locations of ``similar passage'' pairs. Besides, there has been no public and standard corpora available to evaluate PDS in Indonesian texts. To address the weaknesses of former researches, this thesis develops a plagiarism detection system which executes various methods of plagiarism detection stages in a workflow system. In retrieval stage, a novel document feature coined as phraseword is introduced and executed along with word unigram and character n-grams to address the problem of retrieving source documents, whose contents are copied partially or obfuscated in a suspicious document. The detection stage, which exploits a two-step paragraph-based comparison, is aimed to address the problems of detecting and locating source-obfuscated passage pairs. The seeds for matching source-obfuscated passage pairs are based on locally-weighted significant terms to capture paraphrased and summarized passages. In addition to this system, an evaluation corpus was created through simulation by human writers, and by algorithmic random generation. Using this corpus, the performance evaluation of the proposed methods was performed in three scenarios. On the first scenario which evaluated source retrieval performance, some methods using phraseword and token features were able to achieve the optimum recall rate 1. On the second scenario which evaluated detection performance, our system was compared to Alvi's algorithm and evaluated in 4 levels of measures: character, passage, document, and cases. The experiment results showed that methods resulted from using token as seeds have higher scores than Alvi's algorithm in all 4 levels of measures both in artificial and simulated plagiarism cases. In case detection, our systems outperform Alvi's algorithm in recognizing copied, shaked, and paraphrased passages. However, Alvi's recognition rate on summarized passage is insignificantly higher than our system. The same tendency of experiment results were demonstrated on the third experiment scenario, only the precision rates of Alvi's algorithm in character and paragraph levels are higher than our system. The higher Plagdet scores produced by some methods in our system than Alvi's scores show that this study has fulfilled its objective in implementing a competitive state-of-the-art algorithm for detecting plagiarism in Indonesian texts. Being run at our test document corpus, Alvi's highest scores of recall, precision, Plagdet, and detection rate on no-plagiarism cases correspond to its scores when it was tested on PAN'14 corpus. Thus, this study has contributed in creating a standard evaluation corpus for assessing PDS for Indonesian documents. Besides, this study contributes in a source retrieval algorithm which introduces phrasewords as document features, and a paragraph-based text alignment algorithm which relies on two different strategies. One of them is to apply local-word weighting used in text summarization field to select seeds for both discriminating paragraph pair candidates and matching process. The proposed detection algorithm results in almost no multiple detection. This contributes to the strength of this algorithm

Mono- and cross-lingual paraphrased text reuse and extrinsic plagiarism detection

Text reuse is the act of borrowing text (either verbatim or paraphrased) from an earlier written text. It could occur within the same language (mono-lingual) or across languages (cross-lingual) where the reused text is in a different language than the original text. Text reuse and its related problem, plagiarism (the unacknowledged reuse of text), are becoming serious issues in many fields and research shows that paraphrased and especially the cross-lingual cases of reuse are much harder to detect. Moreover, the recent rise in readily available multi-lingual content on the Web and social media has increased the problem to an unprecedented scale. To develop, compare, and evaluate automatic methods for mono- and crosslingual text reuse and extrinsic (finding portion(s) of text that is reused from the original text) plagiarism detection, standard evaluation resources are of utmost importance. However, previous efforts on developing such resources have mostly focused on English and some other languages. On the other hand, the Urdu language, which is widely spoken and has a large digital footprint, lacks resources in terms of core language processing tools and corpora. With this consideration in mind, this PhD research focuses on developing standard evaluation corpora, methods, and supporting resources to automatically detect mono-lingual (Urdu) and cross-lingual (English-Urdu) cases of text reuse and extrinsic plagiarism This thesis contributes a mono-lingual (Urdu) text reuse corpus (COUNTER Corpus) that contains real cases of Urdu text reuse at document-level. Another contribution is the development of a mono-lingual (Urdu) extrinsic plagiarism corpus (UPPC Corpus) that contains simulated cases of Urdu paraphrase plagiarism. Evaluation results, by applying a wide range of state-of-the-art mono-lingual methods on both corpora, shows that it is easier to detect verbatim cases than paraphrased ones. Moreover, the performance of these methods decreases considerably on real cases of reuse. A couple of supporting resources are also created to assist methods used in the cross-lingual (English-Urdu) text reuse detection. A large-scale multi-domain English-Urdu parallel corpus (EUPC-20) that contains parallel sentences is mined from the Web and several bi-lingual (English-Urdu) dictionaries are compiled using multiple approaches from different sources. Another major contribution of this study is the development of a large benchmark cross-lingual (English-Urdu) text reuse corpus (TREU Corpus). It contains English to Urdu real cases of text reuse at the document-level. A diversified range of methods are applied on the TREU Corpus to evaluate its usefulness and to show how it can be utilised in the development of automatic methods for measuring cross-lingual (English-Urdu) text reuse. A new cross-lingual method is also proposed that uses bilingual word embeddings to estimate the degree of overlap amongst text documents by computing the maximum weighted cosine similarity between word pairs. The overall low evaluation results indicate that it is a challenging task to detect crosslingual real cases of text reuse, especially when the language pairs have unrelated scripts, i.e., English-Urdu. However, an improvement in the result is observed using a combination of methods used in the experiments. The research work undertaken in this PhD thesis contributes corpora, methods, and supporting resources for the mono- and cross-lingual text reuse and extrinsic plagiarism for a significantly under-resourced Urdu and English-Urdu language pair. It highlights that paraphrased and cross-lingual cross-script real cases of text reuse are harder to detect and are still an open issue. Moreover, it emphasises the need to develop standard evaluation and supporting resources for under-resourced languages to facilitate research in these languages. The resources that have been developed and methods proposed could serve as a framework for future research in other languages and language pairs

Design of a Controlled Language for Critical Infrastructures Protection

We describe a project for the construction of controlled language for critical infrastructures protection (CIP). This project originates from the need to coordinate and categorize the communications on CIP at the European level. These communications can be physically represented by official documents, reports on incidents, informal communications and plain e-mail. We explore the application of traditional library science tools for the construction of controlled languages in order to achieve our goal. Our starting point is an analogous work done during the sixties in the field of nuclear science known as the Euratom Thesaurus.JRC.G.6-Security technology assessmen

Language-Independent Methods for Identifying Cross-Lingual Similarity in Wikipedia

The diversity and richness of multilingual information available in Wikipedia have increased its significance as a language resource. The information extracted from Wikipedia has been utilised for many tasks, such as Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) and supporting multilingual information access. These tasks often rely on gathering data from articles that describe the same topic in different languages with the assumption that the contents are equivalent to each other. However, studies have shown that this might not be the case. Given the scale and use of Wikipedia, there is a need to develop an approach to measure cross-lingual similarity across Wikipedia. Many existing similarity measures, however, require the availability of "language-dependent" resources, such as dictionaries or Machine Translation (MT) systems, to translate documents into the same language prior to comparison. This presents some challenges for some language pairs, particularly those involving "under-resourced" languages where the required linguistic resources are not widely available. This study aims to present a solution to this problem by first, investigating cross-lingual similarity in Wikipedia, and secondly, developing "language-independent" approaches to measure cross-lingual similarity in Wikipedia. Two main contributions were provided in this work to identify cross-lingual similarity in Wikipedia. The first key contribution of this work is the development of a Wikipedia similarity corpus to understand the similarity characteristics of Wikipedia articles and to evaluate and compare various approaches for measuring cross-lingual similarity. The author elicited manual judgments from people with the appropriate language skills to assess similarities between a set of 800 pairs of interlanguage-linked articles. This corpus contains Wikipedia articles for eight language pairs (all pairs involving English and including well-resourced and under-resourced languages) of varying degrees of similarity. The second contribution of this work is the development of language-independent approaches to measure cross-lingual similarity in Wikipedia. The author investigated the utility of a number of "lightweight" language-independent features in four different experiments. The first experiment investigated the use of Wikipedia links to identify and align similar sentences, prior to aggregating the scores of the aligned sentences to represent the similarity of the document pair. The second experiment investigated the usefulness of content similarity features (such as char-n-gram overlap, links overlap, word overlap and word length ratio). The third experiment focused on analysing the use of structure similarity features (such as the ratio of section length, and similarity between the section headings). And finally, the fourth experiment investigates a combination of these features in a classification and a regression approach. Most of these features are language-independent whilst others utilised freely available resources (Wikipedia and Wiktionary) to assist in identifying overlapping information across languages. The approaches proposed are lightweight and can be applied to any languages written in Latin script; non-Latin script languages need to be transliterated prior to using these approaches. The performances of these approaches were evaluated against the human judgments in the similarity corpus. Overall, the proposed language-independent approaches achieved promising results. The best performance is achieved with the combination of all features in a classification and a regression approach. The results show that the Random Forest classifier was able to classify 81.38% document pairs correctly (F1 score=0.79) in a binary classification problem, 50.88% document pairs correctly (F1 score=0.71) in a 5-class classification problem, and RMSE of 0.73 in a regression approach. These results are significantly higher compared to a classifier utilising machine translation and cosine similarity of the tf-idf scores. These findings showed that language-independent approaches can be used to measure cross-lingual similarity between Wikipedia articles. Future work is needed to evaluate these approaches in more languages and to incorporate more features