Excellent thoughts above and ++ to both and to OP. Sorry not to have any algorithm suggestions of the quality of the OP and the answers to date.

That said, your desire to allow the user "to submit a mildly edited quote" reaches deep into the subjective... and thus into a province where human cognition still performs better than automated "judgment." BrowserUK's rude spoonerism and kind might be dealt with by adding a stop-list... but we've seen that battle fought and lost. And what might we do to deal with a case where the submitter modifies the original text (containing a word or phrase which is in itself unobjectionable) so that its meter, rhyme or other characteristic --- by virtue of the modification -- suggests an objectionable spoonerism?

For me, though, even bigger concerns arise in the area of accuracy and context. As we've seen recently in (US presidential) politics and elsewhere, an accurately quoted but out of context fragment of an utterance can turn the intent of the original upon its head. So too can what automata might well consider mild editing: for example: a quote which adds a negative or something on the order of s/"We have nothing to fear but fear itself."/"We have to fear fear itself."/)

Thus, though YMMV may vary with your intended application, /me believes that in many cases the tool you're building may -- given the state-of-the-art, today -- still require the application of human eyeballs and judgement in many or most cases.

Update: added "and to OP." /me has no excuse for omitting that in the original.


In reply to Re: Verifying a quote matches (closely enough) a source URI by ww
in thread Verifying a quote matches (closely enough) a source URI by Your Mother

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