Lexical Generalisation for Word-level Matching in Plagiarism Detection

Plagiarism has always been a concern in many sectors, particularly in education. With the sharp rise in the number of electronic resources available online, an increasing number of plagiarism cases has been observed in recent years. As the amount of source materials is vast, the use of plagiarism detection tools has become the norm to aid the investigation of possible plagiarism cases. This paper describes an approach to improve plagiarism detection by incorporating a lexical generalisation technique. The goal is to identify plagiarised texts even if they are paraphrased using different words. Experiments performed on a subset of the PAN‟10 corpus show that the matching approach involving lexical generalisation yields promising results, as compared to standard n-gram matching