Competition Seeks Best Approaches To Detecting Plagiarism 289
marpot writes "Does your school/university check your homeworks/theses for plagiarism? Nowadays, probably Yes, but are they doing it properly? Little is known about plagiarism detection accuracy, which is why we conduct a competition on plagiarism detection, sponsored by Yahoo! We have set up a corpus of artificial plagiarism which contains plagiarism with varying degrees of obfuscation, and translation plagiarism from Spanish or German source documents. A random plagiarist was employed who attempts to obfuscate his plagiarism with random sequences of text operations, e.g., shuffling, deleting, inserting, or replacing a word. Translated plagiarism is created using machine translation."
Re:Insightful fact... (Score:4, Informative)
But a lot of faith is put in it. I've got a friend that works at the University of Phoenix. We caught up not long ago and he was singing praises about how you just dump a paper into this tool he uses and it instantly tells you the exact percentage of plagiarism content in the student's paper. Too high == disciplinary action - Apparently without even bothering tracking sources or verifying specific plagiarized sections.
Of course, this all came to me second hand - I've not used the tools myself.
Re:Insightful fact... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Insightful fact... (Score:4, Informative)
Forget 20%, I had a rough draft with as high as 61%! The particular service we used in high school was Turnitin.com, and a research paper I wrote for high school had an appendix with a copy of the 1805 Treaty of Tripoli (as a help for the teacher)...the website flagged that as 18% plagiarized, from some random Bell Atlantic user's website.
Excluding that, the site would flag random sentences, and would flag part of a sentence as plagiarized, skip a word or two, and then say the rest of the sentence was plagiarized from the same source!
An example is shown below (words in bold are supposedly plagiarized from one source, words in italics from another):
Thus, the Founding Fathers wanted to create a government that was stable, and protected the rights of the people.
Another example from a paper on the Russo-German war of 1941:
They propose that German troops push all the way to the outskirts of Moscow, causing Joseph Stalin to abandon the city. While escaping, his train is destroyed by German planes, removing all signiïcant leadership to the Red Army.
In another paper, when I quoted an article, I listed the title of the article in-text. Turnitin reported that the title of the article was plagiarism...of the article I was citing!
Turnitin.com has "features" for excluding the quoted text, and excluding the bibliography, but as I use LaTeX, and like to use block quotes, the usefulness of these features are questionable.
In my opinion, Turnitin.com is a joke.
Re:Insightful fact... (Score:2, Informative)
I find this hard to believe. If you're going to make this statement, I would suggest that each time you say it, you also provide a URL or some other information that would allow the reader to verify your claims. Otherwise it just comes off like a kooky conspiracy theory.