A Comparison of Information Retrieval Techniques for Detecting Source Code Plagiarism

TL;DR

This paper compares various information retrieval techniques to improve the detection of source code plagiarism, specifically for Java, and evaluates their effectiveness against a standard tool like JPlag.

Contribution

It introduces a generalized approach using multiple IR models to enhance source code plagiarism detection beyond string-based methods.

Findings

Different IR models vary in detection accuracy

Some models outperform string-based tools like JPlag

The approach improves efficiency in identifying plagiarized code

Abstract

Plagiarism is a commonly encountered problem in the academia. While there are several tools and techniques to efficiently determine plagiarism in text, the same cannot be said about source code plagiarism. To make the existing systems more efficient, we use several information retrieval techniques to find the similarity between source code files written in Java. We later use JPlag, which is a string-based plagiarism detection tool used in academia to match the plagiarized source codes. In this paper, we aim to generalize on the efficiency and effectiveness of detecting plagiarism using different information retrieval models rather than using just string manipulation algorithms.