Automatic Student Plagiarism Detection: Future Perspectives

The availability and use of computers in teaching has seen an increase in the rate of plagiarism among students because of the wide availability of electronic texts online. While computer tools that have appeared in recent years are capable of detecting simple forms of plagiarism, such as copy-paste...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of educational computing research 2010-01, Vol.43 (4), p.511-531
Main Authors: Mozgovoy, Maxim, Kakkonen, Tuomo, Cosma, Georgina
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Alphabets
Classification
Compliance (Legal)
Computer System Design
Computer Uses in Education
Ethics
Information Retrieval
Intellectual Property
Internet
Natural Language Processing
Plagiarism
Problems
Programming
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Summary:The availability and use of computers in teaching has seen an increase in the rate of plagiarism among students because of the wide availability of electronic texts online. While computer tools that have appeared in recent years are capable of detecting simple forms of plagiarism, such as copy-paste, a number of recent research studies devoted to evaluation and comparison of plagiarism detection tools revealed that these contain limitations in detecting complex forms of plagiarism such as extensive paraphrasing and use of technical tricks, such as replacing original characters with similar-looking characters from foreign alphabets. This article investigates limitations in automatic detection of student plagiarism and proposes ways on how these issues could be tackled in future systems by applying various natural language processing and information retrieval technologies. A classification of types of plagiarism is presented, and an analysis is provided of the most promising technologies that have the potential of dealing with the limitations of current state-of-the-art systems. Furthermore, the article concludes with a discussion on legal and ethical issues related to the use of plagiarism detection software. The article, hence, provides a “roadmap” for developing the next generation of plagiarism detection systems.
ISSN:0735-6331
1541-4140
DOI:10.2190/EC.43.4.e