In this day and age, information is plentiful, but attention spans unfortunately are not. You need to be able to write content that’s not just compelling but also authentic and credible. Failing to do so will not only affect how well your content is understood, but will also have a ripple-effect on your brand, company, organization or its credibility as well.

This is where article checker tools can help. As yet another tool in the ever-growing toolbox of content creators, article checkers use the latest advances in natural language processing, machine learning and AI to check content to ensure that it’s not only grammatically and structurally correct, but that it’s factual and plagiarism-free as well. 

In this article, we’re going to do a deep-dive into how these tools work and how they can help improve the integrity and credibility of every piece you write. 

How Article Checker Tools Have Evolved

Computer-based writing gave us the first advances in article checkers in the form of spell-checkers. Rudimentary by today’s standards, these checkers were simply based on a dictionary look-up system, flagging anything that didn’t match a word already found in their internal dictionary. These were considered cutting edge at the time.

Grammar checkers soon followed, identifying common grammar errors like misplaced modifiers or subject-verb agreement issues. These types of systems used basic rules-based systems to uncover errors and offered suggestions based on a predetermined set of rules. Oftentimes, grammar checks were prone to false positives or false negatives because of their lack of understanding of the context in which the article was written, or subtleties like nuance or certain idioms. 

As natural language processing and machine learning technologies started to mature, more robust article checker tools cropped up. Rather than being based on strict rules and dictionaries, these newer models used different methods to try to understand the context and even the tone of the text, paving the way for more context-aware grammar checks which included tools that could understand idioms and slang. 

The Addition of Plagiarism Detection 

Fast-forward to the late 1990s, when the first plagiarism detection software was developed. At this time, more straightforward techniques like string matching were used to find chunks of text from the content being analyzed and compared them to pre-existing databases, flagging the text as plagiarism if a match was found. This was fine for catching verbatim copying but there were several limitations, most notably that the software couldn’t detect paraphrased content or instances where someone replaced a few words in a sentence. 

Beyond that, string matching needed a very large database of existing content in order to work correctly, and in the early days of the internet, databases were far less comprehensive than they are now. Like other types of software, plagiarism detection programs evolved to incorporate keyword and checksum-based searches but more complex cases of plagiarism still eluded them, even with the growth of the internet and the ability to search texts directly online. 

The Birth of Fact-Checking Tools

Fact-checking tools followed a similar trajectory to plagiarism detection software. Early models were purely database-driven, so they could only check facts against pre-existing data sets. With new advances in real-time website scraping and training as well as integration of multiple APIs (a way for programs to access the features of other programs), fact-checking tools can now consult a variety of databases, academic journals and other credible sources in real-time.

The Addition of AI to Article Checker Tools

The latest advances in article checker tools are AI-driven algorithms that can analyze huge swaths of data in order to provide real-time suggestions to improve your writing according to your own unique style and “writing fingerprint”. These tools use machine learning models and are trained on very large sets of data in order to understand all the intricacies and nuances of human language. That means that not only can they do a detailed grammar and fact-check, but they can also assess the readability of the content and even the emotional tone behind it. 

Now that you understand how far we’ve come in creating and using article copy tools, how exactly can these tools help you improve the integrity of your content? Let’s take a closer look: 

How a Modern Article Copy Checker Can Improve Your Writing

There are several ways that a modern article checker tool can help improve your writing efficiency and content integrity, including:

Plagiarism Detection

Plagiarism isn’t just something you needed to steer clear of at university. It’s also pervasive in professional writing as well. Plagiarism undermines your credibility as a writer and reflects poorly on the platform you’re writing for. Today’s more advanced article copy checkers, like Originality.AI’s plagiarism checker can go far beyond simple text string matching to recognize paraphrasing, context and even the intent behind using certain phrases. This, in turn, allows content creators to ensure that their work is 100% original and free from plagiarism and AI writing, which helps them to maintain professional credibility as well as reach high ethical standards for every piece of content they create. 

Language Quality and Readability

Poor grammar, confusing sentence structure, misspellings and a mismatch between the readability level and the language level of the target audience can all affect your article’s ability to be understood by your readers. The best AI-based article checker tools leverage real-time readability suggestions for improving your writing according to tested and proven readability formulas, like Flesch-Kincaid and others, helping you to tailor your writing to specific audiences and demographics. 

The Power of Semantic Analysis

The right article checker tool goes beyond making sure your content is factually accurate and grammatically correct. It needs to understand the flow of ideas and the connections and arguments you made. That’s where semantic analysis comes in. 

Semantic analysis is like having a brainiac buddy who tells you not just if what you’re writing is correct grammatically, but that it actually makes sense and flows well. LIke building a puzzle, every piece has to fit together in order for the content to make sense as a whole. Semantic analysis is the method by which computers make your pieces fit rather than get lost in a confusing maze of disconnected ideas. 

Semantic analysis is unusual because as you can see from our little romp through the evolution of the article checker tool, throughout the history of computers, they’ve never exactly been great at understanding human language. They could check your spelling and grammar but only if those things fit into a firmly-defined set of rules. Understanding “meaning” was difficult. Through AI and natural language processing, computers are much better at this today and can look at the relationships between words and how they’re used, as well as the overall structure of your content. 

Semantic analysis is like having your own personal writing coach inside your computer, someone who’s able to identify key concepts, look for consistency, check the flow and structure of an article, look at the context and make customized suggestions to improve your writing. 

Continuous Updates and Improvements 

Last but certainly not least is the need for the right article checker tools to be continuously developed, updated and improved upon. With advances in AI and machine learning technology continuing to be released, many article credibility checkers are subscription-based platforms rather than a software program that now comes with a one-time purchase.

This kind of setup lets these programs have more ongoing updates and improvements while making adjustments to their algorithms that help them continue to constantly learn and evolve as more and more people use them. This helps both the content creator and the program to learn and improve over time. 

What’s Next for Article Checker Tools? 

As you can see, article checker tools haven’t evolved on their own. They’ve stood on the shoulders of some pretty impressive giants, from the early days of spell checkers in the 1970s to advances in grammar checkers and basic plagiarism checkers in the 1990s and early 2000s. These basic writing assistants have evolved into full-fledged, powerful tools that leverage semantic analysis, machine learning, AI-driven real-time feedback and much more to analyze and scrutinize every angle of an article to make it the best it can possibly be. 

Expect these developments to continue growing and improving as tools become even more intelligent, context aware and able to provide feedback and perform detailed accuracy checks in real-time in the future. With new releases like Originality.AI’s new fact checking tool, you can now check the details of every article to ensure that not only is it free of plagiarism and AI writing, but that the article’s facts also stand on their own merits according to trusted sources and peer-reviewed journals that back up your statements. 

Try Originality.AI’s new article checker tool now alongside our complete toolkit of services for writers and content creators, including our readability checker, plagiarism detector, AI writing detector, text comparison and content optimizer tool and see how much better your content can be with the latest tools and technology on your side!