When applied to the problem of plagiarism detection, documents are compared for verbatim text overlaps.

Numerous methods have been proposed to tackle this task, of which some have been adapted to external plagiarism detection.

Intrinsic plagiarism detection using stylometry can overcome the boundaries of textual similarity to some extent by comparing linguistic similarity.

It has not been adopted by commercial software, but a first prototype of a citation-based plagiarism detection system exists.

Semantic networks are used in specialized information retrieval tasks, such as plagiarism detection.