Plagiarism detection

Plagiarism detection is the process of locating instances of plagiarism within a work or document. The widespread use of computers and the advent of the Internet has made it easier to plagiarize the work of others. Most cases of plagiarism are found in academia, where documents are typically essays or reports. However, plagiarism can be found in virtually any field, including scientific papers, art designs, and source code.

Detection of plagiarism can be either manual or software-assisted. Manual detection requires substantial effort and excellent memory, and is impractical in cases where too many documents must be compared, or original documents are not available for comparison. Software-assisted detection allows vast collections of documents to be compared to each other, making successful detection much more likely.

The practice of plagiarizing by use of sufficient word substitutions to elude detection software is known as rogeting.[1]

Software-assisted detection

Computer-assisted plagiarism detection (CaPD) is an Information retrieval (IR) task supported by specialized IR systems, referred to as plagiarism detection systems (PDS).

In text documents

Systems for text-plagiarism detection implement one of two generic detection approaches, one being external, the other being intrinsic.[2] External detection systems compare a suspicious document with a reference collection, which is a set of documents assumed to be genuine.[3] Based on a chosen document model and predefined similarity criteria, the detection task is to retrieve all documents that contain text that is similar to a degree above a chosen threshold to text in the suspicious document.[4] Intrinsic PDS solely analyze the text to be evaluated without performing comparisons to external documents. This approach aims to recognize changes in the unique writing style of an author as an indicator for potential plagiarism.[5] PDS are not capable of reliably identifying plagiarism without human judgment. Similarities are computed with the help of predefined document models and might represent false positives.[6][7][8][9][10]

Approaches

The figure below represents a classification of all detection approaches currently in use for computer-assisted plagiarism detection. The approaches are characterized by the type of similarity assessment they undertake: global or local. Global similarity assessment approaches use the characteristics taken from larger parts of the text or the document as a whole to compute similarity, while local methods only examine pre-selected text segments as input.

Classification of computer-assisted plagiarism detection methods
Fingerprinting

Fingerprinting is currently the most widely applied approach to plagiarism detection. This method forms representative digests of documents by selecting a set of multiple substrings (n-grams) from them. The sets represent the fingerprints and their elements are called minutiae.[11][12] A suspicious document is checked for plagiarism by computing its fingerprint and querying minutiae with a precomputed index of fingerprints for all documents of a reference collection. Minutiae matching with those of other documents indicate shared text segments and suggest potential plagiarism if they exceed a chosen similarity threshold.[13] Computational resources and time are limiting factors to fingerprinting, which is why this method typically only compares a subset of minutiae to speed up the computation and allow for checks in very large collection, such as the Internet.[11]

String matching

String matching is a prevalent approach used in computer science. 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. Checking a suspicious document in this setting requires the computation and storage of efficiently comparable representations for all documents in the reference collection to compare them pairwise. Generally, suffix document models, such as suffix trees or suffix vectors, have been used for this task. Nonetheless, substring matching remains computationally expensive, which makes it a non-viable solution for checking large collections of documents.[14][15][16]

Bag of words

Bag of words analysis represent the adoption of vector space retrieval, a traditional IR concept, to the domain of plagiarism detection. Documents are represented as one or multiple vectors, e.g. for different document parts, which are used for pair wise similarity computations. Similarity computation may then rely on the traditional cosine similarity measure, or on more sophisticated similarity measures.[17][18][19]

Citation analysis

Citation-based plagiarism detection (CbPD)[20] relies on citation analysis, and is the only approach to plagiarism detection that does not rely on the textual similarity.[21] CbPD examines the citation and reference information in texts to identify similar patterns in the citation sequences. As such, this approach is suitable for scientific texts, or other academic documents that contain citations. Citation analysis to detect plagiarism is a relatively young concept. It has not been adopted by commercial software, but a first prototype of a citation-based plagiarism detection system exists.[22] Similar order and proximity of citations in the examined documents are the main criteria used to compute citation pattern similarities. Citation patterns represent subsequences non-exclusively containing citations shared by the documents compared.[21][23] Factors, including the absolute number or relative fraction of shared citations in the pattern, as well as the probability that citations co-occur in a document are also considered to quantify the patterns’ degree of similarity.[21][23][24][25]

Stylometry

Stylometry subsumes statistical methods for quantifying an author’s unique writing style[26][27] and is mainly used for authorship attribution or intrinsic CaPD. By constructing and comparing stylometric models for different text segments, passages that are stylistically different from others, hence potentially plagiarized, can be detected.[5]

Performance

Comparative evaluations of plagiarism detection systems[3][28][29][30][31][32] indicate that their performance depends on the type of plagiarism present (see figure). Except for citation pattern analysis, all detection approaches rely on textual similarity. It is therefore symptomatic that detection accuracy decreases the more plagiarism cases are obfuscated.

Detection performance of CaPD approaches depending on the type of plagiarism being present

Literal copies, aka copy and paste (c&p) plagiarism, or modestly disguised plagiarism cases can be detected with high accuracy by current external PDS if the source is accessible to the software. Especially substring matching procedures achieve a good performance for c&p plagiarism, since they commonly use lossless document models, such as suffix trees. The performance of systems using fingerprinting or bag of words analysis in detecting copies depends on the information loss incurred by the document model used. By applying flexible chunking and selection strategies, they are better capable of detecting moderate forms of disguised plagiarism when compared to substring matching procedures.

Intrinsic plagiarism detection using stylometry can overcome the boundaries of textual similarity to some extent by comparing linguistic similarity. Given that the stylistic differences between plagiarized and original segments are significant and can be identified reliably, stylometry can help in identifying disguised and paraphrased plagiarism. Stylometric comparisons are likely to fail in cases where segments are strongly paraphrased to the point where they more closely resemble the personal writing style of the plagiarist or if a text was compiled by multiple authors. The results of the International Competitions on Plagiarism Detection held in 2009, 2010 and 2011,[3][31][32] as well as experiments performed by Stein,[33] indicate that stylometric analysis seems to work reliably only for document lengths of several thousand or tens of thousands of words, which limits the applicability of the method to CaPD settings.

An increasing amount of research is performed on methods and systems capable of detecting translated plagiarisms. Currently, cross-language plagiarism detection (CLPD) is not viewed as a mature technology[34] and respective systems have not been able to achieve satisfying detection results in practice.[30]

Citation-based plagiarism detection using citation pattern analysis is capable of identifying stronger paraphrases and translations with higher success rates when compared to other detection approaches, because it is independent of textual characteristics.[21][24] However, since citation-pattern analysis depends on the availability of sufficient citation information, it is limited to academic texts. It remains inferior to text-based approaches in detecting shorter plagiarized passages, which are typical for cases of copy-and-paste or shake-and-paste plagiarism; the latter refers to mixing slightly altered fragments from different sources.[35]

Software

The design of plagiarism detection software for use with text documents is characterized by a number of factors:

Factor Description and alternatives
Scope of search In the public internet, using search engines / Institutional databases / Local, system-specific database.
Analysis time Delay between the time a document is submitted and the time when results are made available.
Document capacity / Batch processing Number of documents the system can process per unit of time.
Check intensity How often and for which types of document fragments (paragraphs, sentences, fixed-length word sequences) does the system query external resources, such as search engines.
Comparison algorithm type The algorithms that define the way the system uses to compare documents against each other.
Precision and Recall Number of documents correctly flagged as plagiarized compared to the total number of flagged documents, and to the total number of documents that were actually plagiarized. High precision means that few false positives were found, and high recall means that few false negatives were left undetected.

Most large-scale plagiarism detection systems use large, internal databases (in addition to other resources) that grow with each additional document submitted for analysis. However, this feature is considered by some as a violation of student copyright.

The following systems are mostly web-based, and are closed-source, with the exception of CitePlag and CopyTracker. The following list is non-exhaustive (see also Comparison of anti-plagiarism software):

Free of charge
Chimpsky[36][37][38]
CitePlag[23][39]
CopyTracker[37][38][40]
eTBLAST
Plagium[38][41]
SeeSources[38][42]
Commercial
Attributor
Copyscape
PlagTracker
Iparadigms: Ithenticate, Turnitin
PlagiarismDetect[37][38]
PlagScan[37][38]
VeriGuide[43][44]
The Plagiarism Checker[45][46]

In source code

Plagiarism in computer source code is also frequent, and requires different tools than those used for text comparisons in document. Significant research has been dedicated to academic source-code plagiarism.[47]

A distinctive aspect of source-code plagiarism is that there are no essay mills, such as can be found in traditional plagiarism. Since most programming assignments expect students to write programs with very specific requirements, it is very difficult to find existing programs that already meet them. Since integrating external code is often harder than writing it from scratch, most plagiarizing students choose to do so from their peers.

According to Roy and Cordy,[48] source-code similarity detection algorithms can be classified as based on either

The previous classification was developed for code refactoring, and not for academic plagiarism detection (an important goal of refactoring is to avoid duplicate code, referred to as code clones in the literature). The above approaches are effective against different levels of similarity; low-level similarity refers to identical text, while high-level similarity can be due to similar specifications. In an academic setting, when all students are expected to code to the same specifications, functionally equivalent code (with high-level similarity) is entirely expected, and only low-level similarity is considered as proof of cheating.

See also

References

  1. ↑ Grove, Jack (7 August 2014). "Sinister buttocks? Roget would blush at the crafty cheek Middlesex lecturer gets to the bottom of meaningless phrases found while marking essays". Times Higher Education. Retrieved 15 July 2015.
  2. ↑ Stein, Benno; Koppel, Moshe; Stamatatos, Efstathios (Dec 2007), "Plagiarism Analysis, Authorship Identification, and Near-Duplicate Detection PAN’07" (PDF), SIGIR Forum 41 (2), doi:10.1145/1328964.1328976
  3. 1 2 3 Potthast, Martin; Stein, Benno; Eiselt, Andreas; Barrón-Cedeño, Alberto; Rosso, Paolo (2009), "Overview of the 1st International Competition on Plagiarism Detection", PAN09 - 3rd Workshop on Uncovering Plagiarism, Authorship and Social Software Misuse and 1st International Competition on Plagiarism Detection (PDF), CEUR Workshop Proceedings 502, pp. 1–9, ISSN 1613-0073
  4. ↑ Stein, Benno; Meyer zu Eissen, Sven; Potthast, Martin (2007), "Strategies for Retrieving Plagiarized Documents", Proceedings 30th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference (PDF), ACM, pp. 825–826, doi:10.1145/1277741.1277928, ISBN 978-1-59593-597-7
  5. 1 2 Meyer zu Eissen, Sven; Stein, Benno (2006), "Intrinsic Plagiarism Detection", Advances in Information Retrieval 28th European Conference on IR Research, ECIR 2006, London, UK, April 10–12, 2006 Proceedings (PDF), Lecture Notes in Computer Science 3936, Springer, pp. 565–569, doi:10.1007/11735106_66
  6. ↑ Bao, Jun-Peng; Malcolm, James A. (2006), "Text similarity in academic conference papers", 2nd International Plagiarism Conference Proceedings (PDF), Northumbria University Press
  7. ↑ Clough, Paul (2000), Plagiarism in natural and programming languages an overview of current tools and technologies (PDF) (Technical Report), Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield
  8. ↑ Culwin, Fintan; Lancaster, Thomas (2001), "Plagiarism issues for higher education" (PDF), Vine 31 (2): 36–41, doi:10.1108/03055720010804005
  9. ↑ Lancaster, Thomas (2003), Effective and Efficient Plagiarism Detection (PDF) (PhD Thesis), School of Computing, Information Systems and Mathematics South Bank University
  10. ↑ Maurer, Hermann; Zaka, Bilal (2007), "Plagiarism - A Problem And How To Fight It", Proceedings of World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia and Telecommunications 2007, AACE, pp. 4451–4458
  11. 1 2 Hoad, Timothy; Zobel, Justin (2003), "Methods for Identifying Versioned and Plagiarised Documents" (PDF), Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 54 (3): 203–215, doi:10.1002/asi.10170, CiteSeerX: 10.1.1.18.2680
  12. ↑ Stein, Benno (July 2005), "Fuzzy-Fingerprints for Text-Based Information Retrieval", Proceedings of the I-KNOW ‘05, 5th International Conference on Knowledge Management, Graz, Austria (PDF), Springer, Know-Center, pp. 572–579
  13. ↑ Brin, Sergey; Davis, James; Garcia-Molina, Hector (1995), "Copy Detection Mechanisms for Digital Documents", Proceedings of the 1995 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data (PDF), ACM, pp. 398–409, doi:10.1145/223784.223855, ISBN 1-59593-060-4
  14. ↑ Monostori, Krisztián; Zaslavsky, Arkady; Schmidt, Heinz (2000), "Document Overlap Detection System for Distributed Digital Libraries", Proceedings of the fifth ACM conference on Digital libraries (PDF), ACM, pp. 226–227, doi:10.1145/336597.336667, ISBN 1-58113-231-X
  15. ↑ Baker, Brenda S. (February 1993), On Finding Duplication in Strings and Software (gs) (Technical Report), AT&T Bell Laboratories, NJ
  16. ↑ Khmelev, Dmitry V.; Teahan, William J. (2003), "A Repetition Based Measure for Verification of Text Collections and for Text Categorization", SIGIR'03: Proceedings of the 26th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, ACM, pp. 104–110, doi:10.1145/860435.860456, CiteSeerX: 10.1.1.9.6155
  17. ↑ Si, Antonio; Leong, Hong Va; Lau, Rynson W. H. (1997), "CHECK: A Document Plagiarism Detection System", SAC ’97: Proceedings of the 1997 ACM symposium on Applied computing (PDF), ACM, pp. 70–77, doi:10.1145/331697.335176, ISBN 0-89791-850-9
  18. ↑ Dreher, Heinz (2007), "Automatic Conceptual Analysis for Plagiarism Detection" (PDF), Information and Beyond: The Journal of Issues in Informing Science and Information Technology 4: 601–614
  19. ↑ Muhr, Markus; Zechner, Mario; Kern, Roman; Granitzer, Michael (2009), "External and Intrinsic Plagiarism Detection Using Vector Space Models", PAN09 - 3rd Workshop on Uncovering Plagiarism, Authorship and Social Software Misuse and 1st International Competition on Plagiarism Detection (PDF), CEUR Workshop Proceedings 502, pp. 47–55, ISSN 1613-0073
  20. ↑ Gipp, Bela (2014), "Citation-based Plagiarism Detection - Detecting Disguised and Cross-language Plagiarism using Citation Pattern Analysis", Springer Vieweg Research, ISBN 978-3-658-06393-1 http://www.springer.com/springer+vieweg/it+%26+informatik/k%C3%BCnstliche+intelligenz/book/978-3-658-06393-1 Missing or empty |title= (help)
  21. 1 2 3 4 Gipp, Bela; Beel, Jöran (June 2010), "Citation Based Plagiarism Detection - A New Approach to Identifying Plagiarized Work Language Independently", Proceedings of the 21st ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia (HT'10) (PDF), ACM, pp. 273–274, doi:10.1145/1810617.1810671, ISBN 978-1-4503-0041-4
  22. ↑ Gipp, Bela; Meuschke, Norman; Breitinger, Corinna; Lipinski, Mario; Nürnberger, Andreas (28 Jul 2013 - Aug. 1), "Demonstration of Citation Pattern Analysis for Plagiarism Detection", Proceedings of the 36th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (PDF), ACM, doi:10.1145/2484028.2484214 Check date values in: |date= (help)
  23. 1 2 3 Gipp, Bela; Meuschke, Norman (September 2011), "Citation Pattern Matching Algorithms for Citation-based Plagiarism Detection: Greedy Citation Tiling, Citation Chunking and Longest Common Citation Sequence", Proceedings of the 11th ACM Symposium on Document Engineering (DocEng2011) (PDF), ACM, pp. 249–258, doi:10.1145/2034691.2034741, ISBN 978-1-4503-0863-2
  24. 1 2 Gipp, Bela; Meuschke, Norman; Beel, Jöran (June 2011), "Comparative Evaluation of Text- and Citation-based Plagiarism Detection Approaches using GuttenPlag", Proceedings of 11th ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL’11) (PDF), ACM, pp. 255–258, doi:10.1145/1998076.1998124, ISBN 978-1-4503-0744-4
  25. ↑ Gipp, Bela; Beel, Jöran (July 2009), "Citation Proximity Analysis (CPA) - A new approach for identifying related work based on Co-Citation Analysis", Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Scientometrics and Informetrics (ISSI’09) (PDF), International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics, pp. 571–575, ISSN 2175-1935
  26. ↑ Holmes, David I. (1998), "The Evolution of Stylometry in Humanities Scholarship", Literary and Linguistic Computing 13 (3): 111–117, doi:10.1093/llc/13.3.111
  27. ↑ Juola, Patrick (2006), "Authorship Attribution" (PDF), Foundations and Trends Information Retrieval 1: 233–334, doi:10.1561/1500000005, ISSN 1554-0669
  28. ↑ Portal Plagiat - Softwaretest 2004 (in German), HTW University of Applied Sciences Berlin, retrieved October 6, 2011
  29. ↑ Portal Plagiat - Softwaretest 2008 (in German), HTW University of Applied Sciences Berlin, retrieved October 6, 2011
  30. 1 2 Portal Plagiat - Softwaretest 2010 (in German), HTW University of Applied Sciences Berlin, retrieved October 6, 2011
  31. 1 2 Potthast, Martin; Barrón-Cedeño, Alberto; Eiselt, Andreas; Stein, Benno; Rosso, Paolo (2010), "Overview of the 2nd International Competition on Plagiarism Detection", Notebook Papers of CLEF 2010 LABs and Workshops, 22–23 September, Padua, Italy (PDF)
  32. 1 2 Potthast, Martin; Eiselt, Andreas; Barrón-Cedeño, Alberto; Stein, Benno; Rosso, Paolo (2011), "Overview of the 3rd International Competition on Plagiarism Detection", Notebook Papers of CLEF 2011 LABs and Workshops, 19–22 September, Amsterdam, Netherlands (PDF)
  33. ↑ Stein, Benno; Lipka, Nedim; Prettenhofer, Peter (2011), "Intrinsic Plagiarism Analysis" (PDF), Language Resources and Evaluation 45 (1): 63–82, doi:10.1007/s10579-010-9115-y, ISSN 1574-020X
  34. ↑ Potthast, Martin; Barrón-Cedeño, Alberto; Stein, Benno; Rosso, Paolo (2011), "Cross-Language Plagiarism Detection" (PDF), Language Resources and Evaluation 45 (1): 45–62, doi:10.1007/s10579-009-9114-z, ISSN 1574-020X
  35. ↑ Weber-Wulff, Debora (June 2008), "On the Utility of Plagiarism Detection Software", In Proceedings of the 3rd International Plagiarism Conference, Newcastle Upon Tyne (PDF)
  36. ↑ Chimpsky at University of Waterloo. Canada.
  37. 1 2 3 4 Abdelmoneim, Salah-Eldin (September 30, 2010). "Plagiarism What is it? How to avoid it?" (PDF). 14th Alexandria Anaesthesia & Intensive Care Conference. Alexandria Faculty of Medicine.
  38. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Koovakkai, Dineshan (March 2–4, 2011). "Diagnosing Plague: Tools And Techniques For Detecting Plagiarism" (PDF). 8th International CALIBER - 2011, Goa University, Goa. INFLIBNET Centre, Ahmedaba, India.
  39. ↑ Meuschke, Norman; Gipp, Bela; Breitinger, Corinna (May 31, 2012). CitePlag: A Citation-based Plagiarism Detection System Prototype (conference paper). 5th Annual Plagiarism Conference. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK.
  40. ↑ "CopyTracker.org". École Centrale de Lille. France. Archived from the original on 2012-09-18.
  41. ↑ Mapes, Diane (September 10, 2009). "Steal this story? Beware Net’s plagiarism ‘cops’". MSNBC.com.
  42. ↑ SeeSources at PlagScan.com. Germany.
  43. ↑ Veriguide.org. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
  44. ↑ King, Irwin (April 1, 2010). "Introduction to Social Computing". In Kitagawa, et al. Database Systems for Advanced Applications: 15th International Conference, 2010, Tsukuba, Japan, Proceedings, Part II. p. 482.
  45. ↑ PlagiarismChecker at Dustball.com. US.
  46. ↑ Vij, Rajeev; Soni, Navin Kumar; Makhdumi, Gayas (February 25–27, 2009). "Encouraging Academic Honesty through Anti-plagiarism Software" (PDF). 7th International CALIBER-2009, Pondicherry University, Pondicherry (INFLIBNET Centre, Ahmedabad, India): 444. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2012-03-24.
  47. ↑ "Plagiarism Prevention and Detection - On-line Resources on Source Code Plagiarism". Higher Education Academy, University of Ulster.
  48. ↑ Roy, Chanchal Kumar;Cordy, James R. (September 26, 2007)."A Survey on Software Clone Detection Research". School of Computing, Queen's University, Canada.

Literature

External links

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