A Comparison of Similarity Techniques for Detecting Source Code Plagiarism

Academic dishonesty is a universal problem. Detecting duplicated text among natural language artifacts is a welldocumented task. However, performing similar analysis on source code presents unique problems. In this paper, I present a comparison of the application of various techniques in textual similarity processing on source code. Beyond this, I investigate the application of textual similarity algorithms on the Abstract Syntax Tree (AST), Control Flow Graph (CFG), and Intermediate Representation (IR) produced by the LLVM compiler toolchain. Aggregate similarity scores of a variety of methods compare favorably against the current state-of-the-art source code plagiarism tool.