Plagiarism detection across programming languages

ABSTRACT

Plagiarism is a widespread problem in assessment tasks; in computing courses, students often plagiarise source code. For all but the smallest classes, manual detection of such plagiarism is impractical, and, while automated tools are available, none has been applied to detect inter-lingual plagiarism, where source code is copied from one language to another. In this work, we propose a novel approach, XPlag, to detect plagiarism involving multiple languages using intermediate program code produced by a compiler suite. We describe experiments to evaluate XPlag, and show that we can detect inter-lingual plagiarism with reasonably good precision.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.4 Software/Program Verification

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
        D.2.13 Reusable Software
            Subjects: Domain engineering
      D.2.5 Testing and Debugging
      D.2.7 Distribution, Maintenance, and Enhancement
          Subjects: Restructuring, reverse engineering, and reengineering

  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.2 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
      I.2.2 Automatic Programming
          Subjects: Program synthesis

General Terms:
Algorithms, Design, Theory, Verification

Keywords:
plagiarism detection, program source code similarity