An XML Plagiarism Detection Model for Procedural Programming Languages

Noh, Seo-Young (2003) An XML Plagiarism Detection Model for Procedural Programming Languages. Technical Report 03-14, Computer Science, Iowa State University.

Abstract

Plagiarism is a common place in academics, especially in courses involving programming. In this paper, XPDec, an XML-based model is introduced to detect similarities among programs that arise under plagiarism. Based upon the syntax of a specific programming language, XPDec uses an XML scheme that is suitable for the detection of plagiarism. XML documents are generated from given program sources and XQuery is used to extract information relevant to the detection of plagiarism. The XML¡¯s tree-like representation of query results is exploited to ignore common forms of reordering that arise in plagiarism. The level of similarity between a pair of programs is numerically quantified and reported. The usefulness of XPDec in detection of plagiarism is discussed. XPDec has been implemented, and its architecture is presented.