Author: Daniela Hauber

Have you ever read a text and suddenly felt like you had a déjà vu? Maybe this happened because you came across a sentence that was very similar to one that you already read before. We call this semantic duplicates. Semantic duplicates can happen because we think one specific instruction is so important that we simply have to repeat it. But often semantic duplicates arise from simply copy-pasting text. First, semantic duplicates can lead to inconsistency within the requirements. In detail, if there are two similar sentences that explain the same requirement, the same requirement can be interpreted in two different ways. Second, if the sentences are not just similar, but rather a copy of each other, it makes the copy simply superfluous. However, semantic duplicates are redundant, which is why we decided to tackle this problem.