# Detecting Machine-Translated Paragraphs by Matching Similar Words

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.10641 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.10641/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 24 Apr 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Automatic Machine Translation Detection Using a Surrogate Multilingual Translation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.02958/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Machine-translated text plays an important role in modern life by smoothing communication from various communities using different languages. However, unnatural translation may lead to misunderstanding, a detector is thus needed to avoid the unfortunate mistakes. While a previous method measured the naturalness of continuous words using a N-gram language model, another method matched noncontinuous words across sentences but this method ignores such words in an individual sentence. We have developed a method matching similar words throughout the paragraph and estimating the paragraph-level coherence, that can identify machine-translated text. Experiment evaluates on 2000 English human-generated and 2000 English machine-translated paragraphs from German showing that the coherence-based method achieves high performance (accuracy = 87.0%; equal error rate = 13.0%). It is efficiently better than previous methods (best accuracy = 72.4%; equal error rate = 29.7%). Similar experiments on Dutch and Japanese obtain 89.2% and 97.9% accuracy, respectively. The results demonstrate the persistence of the proposed method in various languages with different resource levels.