Towards the detection of cross-language source code reuse

Abstract

Internet has made available huge amounts of information, also source code. Source code repositories and, in general, programming related websites, facilitate its reuse. In this work, we propose a simple approach to the detection of cross-language source code reuse, a nearly investigated problem. Our preliminary experiments, based on character n-grams comparison, show that considering different sections of the code (i.e., comments, code, reserved words, etc.), leads to different results. When considering three programming languages: C++, Java, and Python, the best result is obtained when comments are discarded and the entire source code is considered.This work has been developed with the support of the project TEXT-ENTERPRISE 2.0: Text comprehension techniques applied to the needs of the Enterprise 2.0 (MICINN, Spain TIN2009-13391-C04-03 (PlanI+D+i)).Flores Sáez, E.; Barrón Cedeño, LA.; Rosso, P.; Moreno Boronat, LA. (2011). Towards the detection of cross-language source code reuse. En Natural Language Processing and Information Systems. Springer Verlag (Germany). 6716:250-253. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-22327-3_31S2502536716Arwin, C., Tahaghoghi, S.M.M.: Plagiarism Detection across Programming Languages. In: Proceedings of the 29th Australasian Computer Science Conference, vol. 48, pp. 277–286 (2006)Faidhi, J., Robinson, S.: An empirical approach for detecting program similarity and plagiarism within a university programming environment. Comput. Educ. 11, 11–19 (1987)Jankowitz, H.T.: Detecting plagiarism in student pascal programs. The Computer Journal 31(1) (1988)Pinto, D., Civera, J., Barrón-Cedeño, A., Juan, A., Rosso, P.: A statistical approach to crosslingual natural language tasks. Journal of Algorithms 64(1), 51–60 (2009)Potthast, M., Barrón-Cedeño, A., Stein, B., Rosso, P.: Cross-Language Plagiarism Detection. Languages Resources and Evaluation. Special Issue on Plagiarism and Authorship Analysis 45(1) (2011)Rosales, F., García, A., Rodríguez, S., Pedraza, J.L., Méndez, R., Nieto, M.M.: Detection of plagiarism in programming assignments. IEEE Transactions on Education 51(2), 174–183 (2008)Stamatatos, E.: Intrinsic Plagiarism Detection Using Character n-gram Profiles. In: Proc. SEPLN 2009, Donostia, Spain, pp. 38–46 (2009