Plagiarism Detection System

Abstract

Over the years, the amount of information available electronically and other forms has grown up. Tendency to copy and paste sections of text and present it as original increases. Plagiarism is the presentation of someone else work as one’s own. When students submit the take home assignments, more than one student may have submitted the same work by copying among students or copying the same work someone else has done by more than one student. In the academic environment plagiarism undermines whole teaching system and harms students as well as reputation of the university/institution.

Testing of these various forms of plagiarism overload the duty of the teacher. But it must not take too much staff time or other resources as those can be utilized in an effectively way. The time of academic staff is already at a premium and must be considered best used in the teaching of students than catching those few who may cheating the system. Similarly financial resources are limited and would be best aim at the provision of student facilities.

The aim of this project is to develop a low cost and accurate automated plagiarism detection system in Ms Word documents to address this vastly spreading problem in the academic environment. Statistical Natural Language Processing techniques and other techniques has been applied to detect most common ways of plagiarism. These techniques were implemented using Visual Basic 6.0 and Microsoft Access database was used to facilitate the system. Implemented system has been evaluated to measure the applicability of the system and overall work was evaluated to judge the suitability of the approach used