Language Support

SafeAssign uses algorithms that make decisions about the originality of the submitted text. The algorithms consider word frequency, sentence structure, and other linguistic characteristics. SafeAssign’s decision making complexity and support varies by language, as does the amount of content Blackboard searches for each language.

Blackboard breaks down language processing complexity based on these tools:

  • Search data source for originality in the language.
    • Wikipedia data
    • Other website data
    • Institutional submission data
    • Global submission data
    • Proquest full text data
  • Stop word filtering: SafeAssign removes stop words from a sentence before it searches for matching text in the above data sources. Stop words are commonly used words, such "as a, it, the," and "on.
  • Language analysis: SafeAssign makes all words lowercase and breaks them down to their root. For example, "Trees" become "tree". SafeAssign uses language analyzers to increase the number of matches that may have a similar meaning as the original text based on the root of the word, but the matching text uses different words.

This table breaks down the tools used for each language in SafeAssign’s search process.

For best results, we recommend using SafeAssign in English, if possible. Other languages may provide less precise results due to a lower volume of data to compare with or language complexities. 

Tools used for each language
Language Institutional database Global database Wikipedia Pages Other websites in language Proquest database Stop word filtering Language analysis
Arabic (ar_SA) Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Beta  
Chinese (zh_CN) Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Beta  
Czech (cs_CZ) Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes    
Danish (da_DK) Yes Yes Yes Yes      
Dutch (nl_NL) Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes    
English, United Kingdom (en_GB) Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
English, United States (en_US) Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
Finnish (fi) Yes Yes Yes Yes   Beta  
French (fr_FR) Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Beta  
German (de_DE) Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Beta  
Italian (it_IT) Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Beta  
Japanese (ja_JP) Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Beta  
Korean (ko_KO) Yes Yes Yes Yes      
Malay (ms_MY) Yes Yes Yes Yes      
Norwegian (nn_NO) Yes Yes   Yes      
Polish (pl_PL) Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes    
Portuguese, Brazilian (pt_BR) Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Beta  
Russian (ru_RU) Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes    
Spanish (es_ES) Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
Swedish (sv_SE) Yes Yes Yes Yes      
Thai (th_TH) Yes Yes Yes Yes      
Turkish (tr_TR) Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes    
Welsh (cy_GB) Yes Yes Yes Yes