Cross Comparison of documents

Posted by MadaboutDana
Feb 27, 2020 at 10:40 AM

This is a really interesting issue, I must say.

Translation software uses the “concordance” feature to identify matching phrases in multiple documents, but it wouldn’t really work for the use case you’re describing.

The trouble is, most of the free/cheap concordance software you’ll find online only shows occurrences of individual words or predefined phrases; after that, as far as I can tell, you’d have to tackle the Very Expensive stuff lawyers love to use.

However, this might be a useful starting point. There’s an interesting list of free (Windows) software here, for example: https://listoffreeware.com/best-free-concordance-software-windows/

I’m not sure how many of them work across multiple documents, however. That’s where the Very Expensive analytics software comes in, I fear.

Another option would be to talk to the nice gentleman who developed, but then shelved, a Windows concordance app that was clearly very popular in the day: http://www.concordancesoftware.co.uk

There are a few open-source concordance programs about, it appears, but I have no idea how good they are. The Wikipedia article on “Concordancers” might provide you with some interesting starting points? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concordancer

Actually, I’ve just found an interesting page on all kinds of concordancers: http://martinweisser.org/corpora_site/concordancers.html

Might be worth a look!
Cheers,
Bill