Chloe Sharp Undergraduate Dissertation 2014/15

Plagiarism Detection

Supervised by M.Stevenson

Abstract

It is safe to say that plagiarism has become a significant problem that academic institutions are facing. With the growth of the internet, copying other people's work and passing it off as your own has never been easier. This problem is added to by the growth of open source code and forums which allow programmers to write, distribute and share code. When analysing techniques that people might use for plagiarism within text these differ greatly to those use in code. I aimed to implement a code plagiarism detection tool using a Greedy String algorithm similar to the one already implemented by JPlag. I successfully achieved this aim by creating a plagiarism detector written in python but detecting plagiarism within java code. Based on the evaluation of the system using precision, recall and F-measure, it successfully detected some test sets but there are improvements that can be made. This is also true for current plagiarism detection softwares, such as JPlag.