Visual Assessment of Alleged Plagiarism Cases

Abstract

We developed a visual analysis tool to support the verification, assessment, and presentation of alleged cases of plagiarism. The analysis of a suspicious document typically results in a compilation of categorized ''finding spots''. The categorization reveals the way in which the suspicious text fragment was created from the source, e.g. by obfuscation, translation, or by shake and paste. We provide a three-level approach for exploring the finding spots in context. The overview shows the relationship of the entire suspicious document to the set of source documents. A glyph-based view reveals the structural and textual differences and similarities of a set of finding spots and their corresponding source text fragments. For further analysis and editing of the finding spot's assessment, the actual text fragments can be embedded side-by-side in the diffline view. The different views are tied together by versatile navigation and selection operations. Our expert reviewers confirm that our tool provides a significant improvement over existing static visualizations for assessing plagiarism cases.