Plagiarism Detector Community

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!

Just discussed the situation with RnD.

1. Some kind of detailed setting to the T-Comparator is planned for the future.

2. Please provide a pair of reports (old-new) with a detailed explanation to what is wrong to our support e-mail (check forum PM). Our RnD requests that a problem is described so that we can be sure that "this" is what you are writing about. Screenshots may help much.

Any user-provided materials are used for internal testing only.

The latest version uses a different detection algorithm, with this setting no longer available - to change the mode of detection we now need to alter not just one thing. This algorithm is much better in general, so we moved to it.

In this version we keep two possible settings: for re-written and for word-to-word Plagiarism. I will soon post a detailed explanation as to these, but in general: re-written is close to "maximum detection" on the previous scale, "word-to-word" - maximum exactness. These settings are results to extensive tests on big collections of Plagiarized  pieces and provided best results we could reach in the recent years.

We are sorry to hear this was so important to you and I will ask our RnD about the possibility to return some manual settings in future.

Force updating to the current version was needed due to some changes on the third side, that made previous version worthless.

P.S. Any other users in need of the manual settings - please inform us either in this topic, or e-mail to our support. The more people need it - the more urgent will be the task.

Versions before 874 have a problem with occasional license loss, somehow connected with USB-storages used. If you need to have your license re-initialized - please send us an e-mail, mentioning your license number.