Kazeem Onisarotu Undergraduate Dissertation 2015/16

Plagiarism Detection

Supervised by M.Stevenson

Abstract

Over the years, plagiarism has become a big issue, especially academically because it promotes undue unfairness. Research on a topic is particularly time consuming and requires a vast amount of resources. Taking this into consideration, it is morally questionable for an individual to pass another persons research as theirs without giving the right and proper acknowledgment. Plagiarism has evolved over the years, aided by the easy access to the internet from which various research, papers , books , journals etc. can be accessed. 

There have been various anti-plagiarism software developed over the years, one in particular being Turnitin , which is being used by most universities in the UK in detecting plagiarism in their students work. The main goal of this research was to develop algorithms for an extrinsic plagiarism detection software, the software aims to detect various plagiarism techniques used to detect suspicious documents using various similarity measures such as the vector space model. The accuracy of the results from the software was evaluated using precision, recall and f-measure