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Competition Seeks Best Approaches To Detecting Plagiarism

Posted by timothy on from the upsetting-the-market-in-online-term-papers dept.

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."

12 of 289 comments (clear)

  1. Insightful fact... by telchine · · Score: 3, Funny

    Here's an insightful fact related to this article:

    Little is known about plagiarism detection accuracy

    1. Re:Insightful fact... by mh1997 · · Score: 3, Funny

      I said "for the most part." It'd actually be a lot more effort to cheat and do enough to get away with it, than it would to just write the paper correctly. The people who are cheating seem to be doing it out of laziness or desperation. They run out of time to complete the assignment, so they Google something and use whatever pops up.

      I completely agree that It'd actually be a lot more effort to cheat and do enough to get away with it, than it would to just write the paper correctly. The people who are cheating seem to be doing it out of laziness or desperation. They run out of time to complete the assignment, so they Google something and use whatever pops up.

    2. Re:Insightful fact... by severoon · · Score: 3, Funny

      Sufficiently advanced cheating is called learning.

      Here's the proper way to cheat—it never failed me in university philosophy courses. Let's say you're supposed to read two or three of Nietzsche's works and write on the topic of Nietzsche: Feminist or Misogynist? You could try to read his books, but you won't understand them. Even if you do understand them, you will need to research his life in order to interpret his works in the proper context. And, after all that, when you finally do all this legwork, you'll only learn that he specifically designed his writings and behavior to lead you into a black hole. No normal human has a chance.

      So here's what you do. You put down the primary sources and go to the library. Read papers published by Ph.D. students that interpret Nietzsche's works and struggle to answer the question before you. Make notes on the general points of the argument and the supporting quotes across several of these papers (they're generally pretty short, and way easier to understand that the primary text). You can even read some Nietzsche if you're feeling adventurous, but I don't recommend it.

      Once you've formulated your own fervently held beliefs about Nietzsche in this way (by ripping them off of original thoughts by people that actually cared), you can leave with only your general notes outlining the arguments and citing the supporting quotes. If there's a good amount of material to choose from, make sure you choose an interpretation that is controversial (but well-supported)...don't turn in just another paper that will make the TA's eye's glaze or the professor want to put a gun in his mouth—liven things up a bit for those poor saps, they're stuck studying philosophy their entire lives! Look at all of the material you've collected and turn it over in your brain...try to synthesize your own controversial conclusion drawn from the points that others have worked so hard to create. Now go party for a couple of days to let it all sink in. The more beer you drink during this time, the less likely that some random quote you read will bubble up from the depths verbatim and get you busted. Once the requisite few days have been partied away, sit down and write the sentence or two that ties together all of the supporting material that you have decided to randomly & provocatively tie together. Include the points and supporting quotes to "prove" what you're saying.

      Instant A. Takes an hour, maybe two at the uni libe, and maybe another couple of hours to draft a typical 5-8 pager. This takes other students in the class weeks of devotion to achieve, leaving you plenty of time to study for your other courses, or study the local bar scene, or interact with the student body (as it were -winkwink-). The best part is, when you sit down to write after a couple of days of partying, it could be a paper, or it could be an in-class midterm or final. Whatever...either way, you're covered.

      --
      but have you considered the following argument: shut up.
  2. Here is my perosnal take on the article... by svendsen · · Score: 4, Funny

    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

    1. Re:Here is my perosnal take on the article... by MadKeithV · · Score: 2, Funny

      It's encrypted with double ROT-13.

  3. Plagarism.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    I think the hardest plagiarism to spot is one where you copy the main idea but you put everything into your own sentence. The main reason is that semantics is still an open problem in AI.

  4. Re:Defeat Plagerism by gnick · · Score: 5, Funny

    Simply using words would not constitute plagiarism. You just can't allow students to use words that somebody else has used before.

    For more information of this technique, please read my recent paper, Clickous Verandim Redundo Berata Quizzomandus.

    --
    He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
  5. Irony by Shadow+Wrought · · Score: 4, Funny

    Just imagine everyone's surprise when all the entrants turn in the exact same process.

    --
    If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
  6. We could ... by PPH · · Score: 4, Funny

    ... use the same system the US Patent Office uses for finding prior art.

    On second thought, scratch that idea.

    --
    Have gnu, will travel.
  7. detecting it is easy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    Calculate an md5 hash of the paper, if it matches the md5 of another, it's plagiarized.

    1. Re:detecting it is easy by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 4, Funny

      And that is why I always change the font and margins on papers that I plagiarize...

  8. Re:The humanities are in trouble. by Areyoukiddingme · · Score: 2, Funny

    Shit, by the time I came back to the keyboard after writing this post and not hitting submit, there were 30 other posts that said the same thing. I must be a plagiarist.... Damnit.