Plagiarism Detector Community

I can understand that in order to change the "arts" version you need to receive several negative feedbacks. However i was informed through e-mail that many other clients also reported very high plagiarism rates in essays that were different in style and expression but had similar content because the subject was the same. Another recommendation would be to unlock the ability for a customer to use the previous version of the software if he finds it better in comparing results at his own institute. I understand you consider it obsolete however it worked better for many clients. If your company does not want to take responsibility for any plagiarism misdetections just pop up a window telling the client that "unless you have installed the newer version you take full responsibility for any false results... etc". It is important to give clients degrees of freedom and keep them happy. For me unfortunately if a new version does n' t come out soon or if i am not able to return to the previous version i will have to switch to another program. Your suggestion about word-word exactness does not solve my problem because it is very weak in detecting plagiarism even in scientific essays and therefore is no option for me.

I wrote to your support team

"I bought  “Plagiarism-detector” on January 4th of 2014 as you can see on the attached mails I received. Until now I was very happy with the product. I have a small business that prepares academic essays and helps students prepare their own original essays. From the 5th  November when I downloaded your last file “pd_setup” I am facing problems. The reason is that the programs distinguishes between arts and sciences and has two options of comparing essays. The science version detects only “word to word” exactness while the arts version is very sensitive in paraphrasing the same answer and shows very high plagiarism percentages. These high percentages of the Arts version are not reliable because the answers of the students are the same – because the questions are the same - but written with completely different words and in completely different style. So these 2 seperate versions are not suitable for me because the science is much less sensitive and the arts much more sensitive than  appropriate to let’s say check a marketing essay that students are obliged to answer the same questions so they have to say the same things more or less. The problem would be solved if I was able to work with the previous version however the program leaves me no option to avoid downloading the new one.
I see these solutions: Solution1 to be able to work with the previous version and avoid downloading the new version
Solution 2: Decrease the sensitivity of the arts version so as to reflect the sensitivity of the old version.
I am waiting to hearing from you soon because these last days I am doing only manual plagiarism and it is very tiring and time consuming."

The answer is:
Thank you for the detailed feedback.
We will consider decreasing detection rates for the Arts, as this is not the first request like this.

As for providing the previous version - unfortunately that is not an option. Due to some third party changes, older version now have a very poor detection rate. That is why we have enabled force update to the current version.

My new question: Since until then the program is useless to me when can i expect such a decreased detection or at least the ability to manually adjust it. You understand that if nothing happends within let's say a week i will switch to another program and would definatelly not recommend yours. Mistakes should be corrected!

I want to know what is the difference between :
lite license and personal license ?

The Exact Sciences.


Text in these fields of knowledge showed certain features of their own, making the above-mentioned obfuscated Plagiarism detection algorithms unacceptable on many cases. Texts in Physics, Maths, etc. usually are much less flexible and enjoy a massive use of domain-specific constructions and expressions that are similar to many texts from the same domain of knowledge. One of the best examples was a certain medical prescription, which was considered Plagiarized upon checking. However a manual check did not confirm it. It turned out that most (if not all) of prescriptions use the same structure of the text as well as the same words and expressions. It is just the components, that change.

Let us take this example from Wikipedia:
“Take of pentobarbitone sodium, three grammes
of sulphate of morphia, two grammes
of hydrate of chloral, fifteen grammes
of table sugar, enough to make fifty grammes.”
And now let’s toss the ingredients randomly:
“Take of hydrate of chloral, three grammes
of pentobarbitone sodium, two grammes
of sulphate of morphia, fifty grammes
of table sugar, enough to make fifteen grammes.”

And now remember the example from the Arts section that was to be detected as Plagiarism. It is rather evident, that due to the same language used these parts will be considered the “same” text, that was obfuscated by changing the word order (one of the approached to obfuscation).

Sure, it is an error, one that we call false-positive. Errors of this kind are usual for all the Plagiarism detection algorithms that are aimed at detecting obfuscated Plagiarism.

Having it in mind, we modified the algorithm specifically for such texts, to detect only what we call “word-to-word” Plagiarism. This algorithm will correctly detect this “prescription” as two different texts, but will also detect those “Arts” example as different texts.

So this “word-to-word” Plagiarism Detection algorithm has the following features:
-   Detects only similar parts of texts
-   Prevents false-positive results
-   Usually shows less Plagiarism then a regular algorithm
-   Is bad at finding even slightly obfuscated Plagiarism

In the recent years we have had several versions of Plagiarism Detector, using this algorithm, and they were provided to customers, that required this kind of check. However having two very different versions is not what we see right, so our RnD spent much time on incorporating both algorithms into a single software!

Plagiarism Detector team is proud to announce the absolutely awesome feature added to Plagiarism Detector – presets for different kinds of documents are now available “out of the box”!

Some theory behind this:
It has been some time, since we first observed cases, when our usual Plagiarism detection algorithms provided unsatisfactory results for certain documents. Additional research highlighted some common features for such cases. These are the specific features of the text in the Arts subjects and Exact Sciences subjects, as we started to call them. While the language for these documents is the same, they usually have some very interesting characteristics, which require different attitude from the Plagiarism detection algorithms.

So, starting with version 885, a user can select the preferable algorithm of check in the Step-by-Step Wizard! Please select “detect Text Rewrite (maximum detection)” if you documents are in the Arts subjects or other similar, and “detect Word-to-Word (maximum exactness)” if your documents are in the Exact Sciences’ fields.

We really believe that this new feature (that we have never seen before elsewhere) will help our customers in the ever-ongoing struggle against copy-paste!