AntiPlag: plagiarism detection on electronic submissions of text based assignments

Abstract

Plagiarism is one of the growing issues in academia and is always a concern in Universities and other academic institutions. The situation is becoming even worse with the availability of ample resources on the web. This paper focuses on creating an effective and fast tool for plagiarism detection for text based electronic assignments. Our plagiarism detection tool named AntiPlag is developed using the tri-gram sequence matching technique. Three sets of text based assignments were tested by AntiPlag and the results were compared against an existing commercial plagiarism detection tool. AntiPlag showed better results in terms of false positives compared to the commercial tool due to the pre-processing steps performed in AntiPlag. In addition, to improve the detection latency, AntiPlag applies a data clustering technique making it four times faster than the commercial tool considered. AntiPlag could be used to isolate plagiarized text based assignments from non-plagiarised assignments easily. Therefore, we present AntiPlag, a fast and effective tool for plagiarism detection on text based electronic assignments.