Identifying academic plagiarism is a pressing task for educational and research institutions, publishers, and funding agencies. Current plagiarism detection systems reliably find instances of copied and moderately reworded text. However, reliably detecting concealed plagiarism, such as strong paraphrases, translations, and the reuse of nontextual content and ideas is an open research problem. In this paper, we extend our prior research on analyzing mathematical content and academic citations. Both are promising approaches for improving the detection of concealed academic plagiarism primarily in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). We make the following contributions: i) We present a two-stage detection process that combines similarity assessments of mathematical content, academic citations, and text. ii) We introduce new similarity measures that consider the order of mathematical features and outperform the measures in our prior research. iii) We compare the effectiveness of the math-based, citation-based, and text-based detection approaches using confirmed cases of academic plagiarism. iv) We demonstrate that the combined analysis of math-based and citation-based content features allows identifying potentially suspicious cases in a collection of 102K STEM documents. Overall, we show that analyzing the similarity of mathematical content and academic citations is a striking supplement for conventional text-based detection approaches for academic literature in the STEM disciplines. The data and code of our study are openly available at https: purl.org hybridPD
Proposing a candidate retrieval model for cross-lingual plagiarism detectionThe method relies on using two levels of proximity informationProposing a topic-based text segmentation methodComparing the method with other cross-lingual plagiarism detection approachesShowing improvements using text segmentation and positional language models The rapid growth of documents in different languages, the increased accessibility of electronic documents, and the availability of translation tools have caused cross-lingual plagiarism detection research area to receive increasing attention in recent years. The task of cross-language plagiarism detection entails two main steps: candidate retrieval and assessing pairwise document similarity. In this paper we examine candidate retrieval, where the goal is to find potential source documents of a suspicious text. Our proposed method for cross-language plagiarism detection is a keyword-focused approach. Since plagiarism usually happens in parts of the text, there is a requirement to segment the texts into fragments to detect local similarity. Therefore we propose a topic-based segmentation algorithm to convert the suspicious document to a set of related passages. After that, we use a proximity-based model to retrieve documents with the best matching passages. Experiments show promising results for this important phase of cross-language plagiarism detection. The Web offers fast and easy access to a wide range of documents in various languages, and translation and editing tools provide the means to create derivative documents fairly easily. This leads to the need to develop effective tools for detecting cross-language plagiarism. Given a suspicious document, cross-language plagiarism detection comprises two main subtasks: retrieving documents that are candidate sources for that document and analyzing those candidates one by one to determine their similarity to the suspicious document. In this paper we focus on the second subtask and introduce a novel approach for assessing cross-language similarity between texts for detecting plagiarized cases. Our proposed approach has two main steps: a vector-based retrieval framework that focuses on high recall, followed by a more precise similarity analysis based on dynamic text alignment. Experiments show that our method outperforms the methods of the best results in PAN-2012 and PAN-2014 in terms of plagdet score. We also show that aligning n-gram units, instead of aligning complete sentences, improves the accuracy of detecting plagiarism.