Plagiarism Detection Avoidance Methods and Countermeasures

Plagiarism is a major problem that educators face in the information age. Today\u27s plagiarist has a near limitless supply of well-written articles via the internet. Due to the scale of the problem, detecting plagiarism has now become the domain of the computer scientist rather than the educator. With the use of computers, documents can be conveniently scanned into a plagiarism detection system that references public web pages, academic journals, and even previous students\u27 papers, acting as an all-seeing eye. However, plagiarists can overcome these digital content detection systems with the use of clever masking and substitutions techniques. These systems cost universities tens of thousands of dollars, and also infringe upon intellectual property ownership rights without the informed consent of individual students. In this work, we examine the efficacy of commercial plagiarism detection systems when used against some selected masking techniques, and then present a simple countermeasure to combat the aforementioned detection avoidance technique

Plagiarism and new media technologies: Combating 'cut 'n paste' culture

Whilst plagiarism has been around since pen was put to paper, the inextricable relationship that education now enjoys with new media technologies has seen its incidence increase to epidemic proportions. Plagiarism has become a blight on tertiary education, insidiously degrading the quality of degrees, largely thanks to ICTs providing students with ways to seamlessly misappropriate information. Many students are increasingly unsure how to avoid it and are being overseen by educators that cannot agree on what exactly constitutes academic dishonesty and how it should be effectively handled. This paper analyses the issues facing students and academics in light of new media in education and increasing moves to online learning. It considers the issues aggravating the problem; rising financial pressures, ambiguous cultural practices, practices in high school education; and seeks to provide a starting point for consistent, pedagogically sound approaches to the problem

Cross-Language Plagiarism Detection

Cross-language plagiarism detection deals with the automatic identification and extraction of plagiarism in a multilingual setting. In this setting, a suspicious document is given, and the task is to retrieve all sections from the document that originate from a large, multilingual document collection. Our contributions in this field are as follows: (1) a comprehensive retrieval process for cross-language plagiarism detection is introduced, highlighting the differences to monolingual plagiarism detection, (2) state-of-the-art solutions for two important subtasks are reviewed, (3) retrieval models for the assessment of cross-language similarity are surveyed, and, (4) the three models CL-CNG, CL-ESA and CL-ASA are compared. Our evaluation is of realistic scale: it relies on 120,000 test documents which are selected from the corpora JRC-Acquis and Wikipedia, so that for each test document highly similar documents are available in all of the six languages English, German, Spanish, French, Dutch, and Polish. The models are employed in a series of ranking tasks, and more than 100 million similarities are computed with each model. The results of our evaluation indicate that CL-CNG, despite its simple approach, is the best choice to rank and compare texts across languages if they are syntactically related. CL-ESA almost matches the performance of CL-CNG, but on arbitrary pairs of languages. CL-ASA works best on "exact" translations but does not generalize well.This work was partially supported by the TEXT-ENTERPRISE 2.0 TIN2009-13391-C04-03 project and the CONACyT-Mexico 192021 grant.Potthast, M.; Barrón Cedeño, LA.; Stein, B.; Rosso, P. (2011). Cross-Language Plagiarism Detection. Language Resources and Evaluation. 45(1):45-62. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-009-9114-zS4562451Ballesteros, L. A. (2001). Resolving ambiguity for cross-language information retrieval: A dictionary approach. PhD thesis, University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA, Bruce Croft.Barrón-Cedeño, A., Rosso, P., Pinto, D., & Juan A. (2008). On cross-lingual plagiarism analysis using a statistical model. In S. Benno, S. Efstathios, & K. Moshe (Eds.), ECAI 2008 workshop on uncovering plagiarism, authorship, and social software misuse (PAN 08) (pp. 9–13). Patras, Greece.Baum, L. E. (1972). An inequality and associated maximization technique in statistical estimation of probabilistic functions of a Markov process. Inequalities, 3, 1–8.Berger, A., & Lafferty, J. (1999). Information retrieval as statistical translation. In SIGIR’99: Proceedings of the 22nd annual international ACM SIGIR conference on research and development in information retrieval (vol. 4629, pp. 222–229). Berkeley, California, United States: ACM.Brin, S., Davis, J., & Garcia-Molina, H. (1995). Copy detection mechanisms for digital documents. In SIGMOD ’95 (pp. 398–409). New York, NY, USA: ACM Press.Brown, P. F., Della Pietra, S. A., Della Pietra, V. J., & Mercer R. L. (1993). The mathematics of statistical machine translation: Parameter estimation. Computational Linguistics, 19(2), 263–311.Ceska, Z., Toman, M., & Jezek, K. (2008). Multilingual plagiarism detection. In AIMSA’08: Proceedings of the 13th international conference on artificial intelligence (pp. 83–92). Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.Clough, P. (2003). Old and new challenges in automatic plagiarism detection. National UK Plagiarism Advisory Service, http://www.ir.shef.ac.uk/cloughie/papers/pas_plagiarism.pdf .Dempster A. P., Laird N. M., Rubin D. B. (1977). Maximum likelihood from incomplete data via the EM algorithm. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series B (Methodological), 39(1), 1–38.Dumais, S. T., Letsche, T. A., Littman, M. L., & Landauer, T. K. (1997). Automatic cross-language retrieval using latent semantic indexing. In D. Hull & D. Oard (Eds.), AAAI-97 spring symposium series: Cross-language text and speech retrieval (pp. 18–24). Stanford University, American Association for Artificial Intelligence.Gabrilovich, E., & Markovitch, S. (2007). Computing semantic relatedness using Wikipedia-based explicit semantic analysis. In Proceedings of the 20th international joint conference for artificial intelligence, Hyderabad, India.Hoad T. C., & Zobel, J. (2003). Methods for identifying versioned and plagiarised documents. American Society for Information Science and Technology, 54(3), 203–215.Levow, G.-A., Oard, D. W., & Resnik, P. (2005). Dictionary-based techniques for cross-language information retrieval. Information Processing & Management, 41(3), 523–547.Littman, M., Dumais, S. T., & Landauer, T. K. (1998). Automatic cross-language information retrieval using latent semantic indexing. In Cross-language information retrieval, chap. 5 (pp. 51–62). Kluwer.Maurer, H., Kappe, F., & Zaka, B. (2006). Plagiarism—a survey. Journal of Universal Computer Science, 12(8), 1050–1084.McCabe, D. (2005). Research report of the Center for Academic Integrity. http://www.academicintegrity.org .Mcnamee, P., & Mayfield, J. (2004). Character N-gram tokenization for European language text retrieval. Information Retrieval, 7(1–2), 73–97.Meyer zu Eissen, S., & Stein, B. (2006). Intrinsic plagiarism detection. In M. Lalmas, A. MacFarlane, S. M. Rüger, A. Tombros, T. Tsikrika, & A. Yavlinsky (Eds.), Proceedings of the European conference on information retrieval (ECIR 2006), volume 3936 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science (pp. 565–569). Springer.Meyer zu Eissen, S., Stein, B., & Kulig, M. (2007). Plagiarism detection without reference collections. In R. Decker & H. J. Lenz (Eds.), Advances in data analysis (pp. 359–366), Springer.Och, F. J., & Ney, H. (2003). A systematic comparison of various statistical alignment models. Computational Linguistics, 29(1), 19–51.Pinto, D., Juan, A., & Rosso, P. (2007). Using query-relevant documents pairs for cross-lingual information retrieval. In V. Matousek & P. Mautner (Eds.), Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (pp. 630–637). Pilsen, Czech Republic.Pinto, D., Civera, J., Barrón-Cedeño, A., Juan, A., & Rosso, P. (2009). A statistical approach to cross-lingual natural language tasks. Journal of Algorithms, 64(1), 51–60.Potthast, M. (2007). Wikipedia in the pocket-indexing technology for near-duplicate detection and high similarity search. In C. Clarke, N. Fuhr, N. Kando, W. Kraaij, & A. de Vries (Eds.), 30th Annual international ACM SIGIR conference (pp. 909–909). ACM.Potthast, M., Stein, B., & Anderka, M. (2008). A Wikipedia-based multilingual retrieval model. In C. Macdonald, I. Ounis, V. Plachouras, I. Ruthven, & R. W. White (Eds.), 30th European conference on IR research, ECIR 2008, Glasgow , volume 4956 LNCS of Lecture Notes in Computer Science (pp. 522–530). Berlin: Springer.Pouliquen, B., Steinberger, R., & Ignat, C. (2003a). Automatic annotation of multilingual text collections with a conceptual thesaurus. In Proceedings of the workshop ’ontologies and information extraction’ at the Summer School ’The Semantic Web and Language Technology—its potential and practicalities’ (EUROLAN’2003) (pp. 9–28), Bucharest, Romania.Pouliquen, B., Steinberger, R., & Ignat, C. (2003b). Automatic identification of document translations in large multilingual document collections. In Proceedings of the international conference recent advances in natural language processing (RANLP’2003) (pp. 401–408). Borovets, Bulgaria.Stein, B. (2007). Principles of hash-based text retrieval. In C. Clarke, N. Fuhr, N. Kando, W. Kraaij, & A. de Vries (Eds.), 30th Annual international ACM SIGIR conference (pp. 527–534). ACM.Stein, B. (2005). Fuzzy-fingerprints for text-based information retrieval. In K. Tochtermann & H. Maurer (Eds.), Proceedings of the 5th international conference on knowledge management (I-KNOW 05), Graz, Journal of Universal Computer Science. (pp. 572–579). Know-Center.Stein, B., & Anderka, M. (2009). Collection-relative representations: A unifying view to retrieval models. In A. M. Tjoa & R. R. Wagner (Eds.), 20th International conference on database and expert systems applications (DEXA 09) (pp. 383–387). IEEE.Stein, B., & Meyer zu Eissen, S. (2007). Intrinsic plagiarism analysis with meta learning. In B. Stein, M. Koppel, & E. Stamatatos (Eds.), SIGIR workshop on plagiarism analysis, authorship identification, and near-duplicate detection (PAN 07) (pp. 45–50). CEUR-WS.org.Stein, B., & Potthast, M. (2007). Construction of compact retrieval models. In S. Dominich & F. Kiss (Eds.), Studies in theory of information retrieval (pp. 85–93). Foundation for Information Society.Stein, B., Meyer zu Eissen, S., & Potthast, M. (2007). Strategies for retrieving plagiarized documents. In C. Clarke, N. Fuhr, N. Kando, W. Kraaij, & A. de Vries (Eds.), 30th Annual international ACM SIGIR conference (pp. 825–826). ACM.Steinberger, R., Pouliquen, B., Widiger, A., Ignat, C., Erjavec, T., Tufis, D., & Varga, D. (2006). The JRC-Acquis: A multilingual aligned parallel corpus with 20+ languages. In Proceedings of the 5th international conference on language resources and evaluation (LREC’2006).Steinberger, R., Pouliquen, B., & Ignat, C. (2004). Exploiting multilingual nomenclatures and language-independent text features as an interlingua for cross-lingual text analysis applications. In Proceedings of the 4th Slovenian language technology conference. Information Society 2004 (IS’2004).Vinokourov, A., Shawe-Taylor, J., & Cristianini, N. (2003). Inferring a semantic representation of text via cross-language correlation analysis. In S. Becker, S. Thrun, & K. Obermayer (Eds.), NIPS-02: Advances in neural information processing systems (pp. 1473–1480). MIT Press.Yang, Y., Carbonell, J. G., Brown, R. D., & Frederking, R. E. (1998). Translingual information retrieval: Learning from bilingual corpora. Artificial Intelligence, 103(1–2), 323–345

Computers, the internet, and cheating among secondary school students: Some implications for educators

This article investigates in greater depth one particular aspect of cheating within secondary education and some implications for measuring academic achievement. More specifically, it examines how secondary students exploit the Internet for plagiarizing schoolwork, and looks at how a traditional method of educational assessment, namely paper-based report and essay writing, has been impacted by the growth of Internet usage and the proliferation of computer skills among secondary school students. One of the conclusions is that students’ technology fluency is forcing educators to revisit conventional assessment methods. Different options for combating Internet plagiarism are presented, and some software tools as well as non-technology solutions are evaluated in light of the problems brought about by “cyberplagiarism.

Experiments to investigate the utility of nearest neighbour metrics based on linguistically informed features for detecting textual plagiarism

Plagiarism detection is a challenge for linguistic models — most current implemented models use simple occurrence statistics for linguistic items. In this paper we report two experiments related to plagiarism detection where we use a model for distributional semantics and of sentence stylistics to compare sentence by sentence the likelihood of a text being partly plagiarised. The result of the comparison are displayed for visual inspection by a plagiarism assessor