(IJCNS) International Journal of Computer and Network Security, 125

Vol. 2, No. 6, June 2010

Using Word Distance Based Measurement for

Cross-lingual Plagiarism Detection
Moslem mohammadi1, Morteza analouei2
1
Payam Nour University of Miandoab, Miandoab, Iran
Mo_mohammadi@comp.iust.ac.ir

2
department of Computer Science and Engineering ,
Iran University of Science and Technology, Tehran, Iran
analoui@iust.ac.ir

Abstract: - a large number of articles and papers in various
languages are available due to the expanding of information
technology and information retrieval. Some authors translate
these papers from original languages to other languages so that
they claim as their own papers. In this paper a method for
detection of exactly translated papers from English to Persian
language is proposed. Document classification is performed by
corner classification neural network (CC4) method to limit the
investigated documents, before the main process is commenced.
For bi-lingual text processing, language unification is necessary
that is performed by a bi-lingual dictionary. After language
unification, the suspicious text fragments are rephrased
according to the original language. Rephrasing is performed
like crystallization process. The similarity is computed based on
equivalent word place distance in English and Persian; in fact,
the paragraphs in a suspicious text are probed in the original
text. Proposed system is tested in two conditions, first with
rephrasing and adopted distance based similarity and other with
tradition method. By comparing the outcomes in two
experiments distinguished that proposed method’s
discriminability is good.
Keywords: plagiarism detection, document classification, bi-
lingual text processing
1. Introduction and motivation
At first, there are several questions that will be discussed.
They are
i. What is the research?
ii. What is the plagiarism?
iii. How an essay is criticized?; and
iv. What is the scientific misconduct?
These questions and instances of like are ambiguous
questions that don’t have a clear answer or they share
overlapped scopes. These terms are defined in table 1.
Some of the paradigms mentioned, are in the academic
dishonesty domain and some of them are not. As mentioned
above, these fields have shared overlapped scopes and the
border line between correct works and incorrect works must
be cleared. Plagiarism is prevalent due to spread
enlargement digital information especially text information
on the internet and other devices. The simple definition of
plagiarism is appropriating another author’s writing or
compilation. The plagiarism may be done through
manipulation of resource, such as text, film, speech and
other literary compilation or artifacts, and through manner,
which Maurer[1] listed four broader categories of plagiarism
as follows:
i. Accidental: due to lack of plagiarism knowledge.
ii. Unintentional: probably the initiation of the same
idea at same time.
iii. Intentional: a deliberate act of copying someone
work without any credit or reference.
iv. Self-plagiarism: republished self published work.
jalali et al.[2] believe that the first two cases occur in non-
English countries since authors are not competent to use
English and to avoid plagiarism. They have suggested that
plagiarism should be avoided by employing a combination
of measures such as explicit warning, using plagiarism
detection software, disseminating knowledge and improving
the academic and writing skills.
In this paper we will discuss about text plagiarism that can
be occurred in same language (monolingual) or other
ones(cross-lingual). In first one, a person copies, rewrites or
rephrases another's text in a similar language and
plagiarism detection in same cases can be performed bye
tradition document similarity algorithms. But in second, a
thief author translates from source language to target
language. For detection; we need extra knowledge bases
such as a dictionary, wordnet and word correlation table.
Actually; plagiarism detection is time consuming because
there are many large text corpora that must be compared
with suspected document, though most of them are
irrelevant. For this reason if we eliminate irrelevant
documents from comparison corpora, we’ll decrease an
indispensable time spontaneously. This is realized by
classification methods that will be explained later.
The paper is organized as follow: in next section the related
works is reviewed and document classification is discussed
in section 3. Thereafter in section 4 the proposed approach
will be explained then datasets and experimental results are
analyzed.
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Table 1: plagiarism related concepts

Research can be defined as the search for knowledge or any systematic
1 Research
investigation to establish facts.
Use or close imitation of the language and thoughts of another author and the
2 Plagiarism
representation of them as one's own original work.
Is the judgment (using analysis and evaluation) of the merits and faults of
3 Criticism
the actions or work of another individual.
built primarily and explicitly from existing texts in order to solve a writing
4 Assemblage
or communication problem in a new context
An essay mill (or paper mill) is a ghostwriting service that sells essays and
5 Essay mill
other homework writing to university and college students
A ghostwriter is a professional writer who is paid to write books, articles,
6 Ghostwriter
stories, reports, or other texts that are officially credited to another person.
Scientific misconduct is the violation of the standard codes of scholarly
7 Scientific misconduct conduct and ethical behavior in professional scientific research.( fabrication,
plagiarism, ghostwriting)

1. The X vector is a dictionary includes all words of

2. Related works documents; in other words, it is the feature set of documents
that must be classified. To save time, after stopwords are
The root of plagiarism detection can be found in the eliminated, we only use 20 frequently appeared words in
document similarity. Huang et al [3] proposed a sense based document for classification. Each entry of X vector is 1 if its
similarity measure for cross-lingual documents that uses corresponding word is in 20 frequently appeared words of
senses for document representation and adopted fuzzy set document, otherwise it is 0. The Y vector represents the
functions for resemblance calculating. Uzuner et al. [4] class tags and here the k value is the number of classes that
identify plagiarism when works are paraphrased using by in our system it is 3. There are distinct classifiers for each
syntactic information related to creative aspect of writing language.
such as ‘sentence-initial and -final phrase structure’, The non iterative training phase is one of important benefit
‘semantic class of verb’ and ‘syntactic class of verb’. Barron of these networks. Incremental training is the other benefit
et al.[5] proposed the cross-lingual plagiarism analysis with of these networks that appropriate these networks for
a probabilistic method which calculates a bilingual classifying enormous documents. In fact, adding the new
statistical dictionary on the basis of the IBM-1 model in training data to extant CC4 network is very easy and simple.
English and Spanish plagiarized examples. Their proposal Furthermore, when the documents are almost of the same
calculates the probabilistic association between two terms in size, CC4 neural network is an effective document
two different languages. classification algorithm.
In [6] an approach based on support vector machine(SVM)
classifier has been proposed to determine similarity between
English and Chinese text. Subsequently, evaluating
semantic similarity among texts measured by means of a
language-neutral clustering technique based on Self-
Organizing Maps (SOM). Selamat et al [7] have used a
Growing Hierarchical Self-Organized Map (GHSOM) to
detect translated English documents to Arabic texts.
Gustafan et al.[8] have proposed a method, relies on pre-
computed word-correlation factors for determining the
sentence-to-sentence similarity which handle various
plagiarism techniques based on substitution, addition, and
deletion of words in sentences. Consequently, the degree of
resemblance of any two documents to detect the plagiarized
copy is computed based on sentence similarity and the visual
Figure 1. CC4 structure
representation of same sentences is generated.
4. Proposed method
3. Document classification
Bi-lingual Plagiarism can be supposed as a translation
Document classification has an important place on text
problem. Clumsy translators or plagiarists are using a literal
mining tasks because that it limits the amount of texts must
translation. Thus in this case, sentence length in both texts
be processed. There are several methods for information
very probability are equal but innate features and structures
classification such as K- Nearest Neighbors (KNN), Naïve
of either one are different. Automatic detection of awkward
Bayes, Support Vector Machine (SVM)[9], Corner
translation seems easy. The professional plagiarist can
Classification Neural Network (CC4)[10], ensemble
change sentences sequence or split longer sentences in two
classifiers[11] and etc. In this system completion of the
or more sentences or do vice versa. For these reasons and
document classification are performed by CC4 that is a kind
other motivations that will be discussed, we used a distance
of three-layered feed forward neural network [12] like figure
based method. Figure 2 is the schematic view of proposed
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Vol. 2, No. 6, June 2010

method. There are three main tasks in proposed system. 4.2. Similarity evaluating
They are As mentioned before, each vector of English words is
i. Document classification: just as explained in changed into jagged matrix of the Persian words, the
previous section, the classification determines tradition vector space methods such as euclidean, cosine,
what documents must be processed. dice, jaccard similarity measures[15] that use the inner
ii. Document representation (translation): documents product of vectors can’t be used for similarity calculation
in different language must be uniformed that will because one side of problem is vector and other side is
be illustrated in next section. matrix. Let t1, t2, · · ·, tn be fragments conforming a
iii. Similarity calculation: this part of system uses a suspicious text T in Persian, and let w1, w2, · · · ,wm be a
word distance base method. collection of W original fragments in English. According to
the structural differences between investigated languages,
the smallest piece of text which must be processed is a
Persian
document
English Paragraph.
documents
The sentence length in English and Persian is different [16],
and one sentence in English during its translation may be
rendered in two or more sentences. Furthermore, the
structural differences exist. For example, the verb placement
Classifier Classifier
in the English sentences is in the middle of sentence but in
the Persian sentences is in the end of sentence. Moreover,
Sorted the sentence boundary detection is an extra task that can be
documents ignored.
At first, the jagged matrix of TW is created according to
Similarity meaning of including words of W like figure 3. The main
evaluating Translate
d aim is computing similarity between T and TW. For this
purpose, each word in T is probed in the TW matrix and a
Dictionary
vector (indi) based on indices of matching words such as (1)
is created.
Rate of similarity

ind i = {j | ti ∈ TWj } (1)

Figure 2. Architect of proposed system
4.1. Document representation
In this research we are dealing with two kinds of documents
in the Persian and English languages which the processing
phase for similarity detection is accomplished in Persian.
The Persian documents after eliminating the non-verbal
stopwords[13], are represented in vector space model [14].
In this adopted model, each paragraph is placed in a vector.
For plagiarism detection from English documents to
Persian, the unification of their language must be
performed. Whereas each word in the English text can have
several meanings and equivalences in Persian, each vector
of English words is changed into jagged matrix of the
Persian words according to the bilingual dictionary. The
schematic description of details comes in figure 3.
Persian paragraph:
Tà t1 t2 t3 … ti
English paragraph:
Englis Persian equivalence
h (TW)
(W)
The similarity measurement is inspired from crystallization.
The crystallization process consists of two major events,
nucleation and crystal growth1. The main idea is creation of
the fragments of text like crystal. indi vectors are equivalent
the solvent and words on them are solute. For crystal
growth we need a lot of nucleus that here we use the words
in T which their indi vectors contain only one word. After
define nucleuses, we should describe crystal growth process
that perform based on T vector. Relation (2) describes it.
 ind i if t i is nucleus (2)

CS i =  0 if t i don' t have equal in W
nearest index to a nucleus
 otherwise
CS is the resembled vector to the T vector that contains
nearest equvalence to the T words. The similarity amount of
this Resembled vector must be measured. For this, we use an
… t adoptive euclidean distance[17] . Euclidean distance is
n computed for two vectors like relation (3), but in adoptive
form we want to influence similarity with word situation
distance in CS vector.
1
 2
2

∑
W1 p11 p12 p13
L( D1 , D2 ) =  d1i - d 2i  (3)
W2 p12 p22  i 
W3 If most of a fragment's words of text in T are neighbors in
p31 p32 p33 p34 p35
CS, there are most probable that these two fragments are
... … … … same. For computing amount of similarity we use the
Wj p1
p 2
p 3j p 4j p 5j p 6j p 7j
j j relation (4).
… … … …
Wm p1
p 2
pm3 pm4
m m

Figure 3. Document representation

128
 
 T 
∑
1 networks and text mining. Furthermore, 100 Persian and
sim(T , W ) =   (4)
 (1 + [ (CSi+1 − CSi ) ] p ) 
i =1
 
 sl 
T and W vectors already are illustrated. CSi shows existence
of ti word of T in W text fragment and in the case of
existence, it shows the location of that word in W. sl is the
average sentence length, where if distance of two words is
equal with sl, the similarity amount equals with 0.5. p is the
slope of curve, which the great value express sharp slope
and diminishes the effect of two far words in similarity
evaluating. Figure (4) shows the relation (4) behavior with
various numbers for |CSi+1- CSi|(distance of two words).
There are several details in computation and
implementation such as treatment with words with CSi zero
value that here these details have not been explained.
1.2
1
0.8
effect on similar ity
0.6
0.4
0.2
0 similarity coefficient in unparallel document would be
1 4 7 10 13 16 19 22 25 28 31 34 37 40 43 46 49
distance
Figure 4. effect of distance on similarity with sl= 15 and
p=8
This fact is important that how far the neighbor words in
original paragraph are from each other in the suspicious
paragraph. Suppose tk and tk+1 are adjacent in T and wi and
wi+d are their equivalents in W. if d or in other words the
distance of two words were closed to each other, we can
consider wi and wi+d in an identical sentence. By
generalizing this fact, the W and T fragments are equal if
most of W words equivalences are neighbor in T. in other
side of coin; we restate T words by illustrated reconstruction
method in CS. If CS contents come from different part of
text or various W, we can not find a unique same for T.
Total similarity between two documents with T and W
fragments is computed by relation (5) that there Pdoc and
Edoc are respectively Persian and corresponding English
document.
sim(Ti , Wj )
similarity( Pdoc, Edoc) = ∑∑
min( Pdoc , Edoc )
i j
5. Experimental result
Dataset gathering in bi-lingual research is the main and
time consuming challenge especially if you are among the
beginners in that domain. In order to evaluate the proposed
approach we used a parallel corpus containing 200
documents in Persian and English that were collected and
translated from internet then converted into .txt format. This
corpus contains documents in English and exact translate of
them in Persian from various genre such as social short
(IJCNS) International Journal of Computer and Network Security,
Vol. 2, No. 6, June 2010
stories, computer science texts in scope of computer
100 English documents without corresponding translation in
corpus were added in same genre. These added documents
were used for false positive evaluation.
For classification task, we supposed three types of
documents so called “story”, “network” and “text”.
When there is no lack of reports on measurement of
semantic similarity of concepts, evaluation of the
performance of semantic similarity measure between cross-
lingual documents has not yet been standardized because
there is no universally recognized benchmark[3] . However,
a simple thumb of rule is that a document should be very
similar to its high-quality translation. With this assumption,
the evaluation criterions adopted in this paper, are the rate
of successful match between the Persian documents and
their parallel English documents (true positive results) and
furthermore maximum similarity rate of documents that
don’t have corresponding translation in corpus (false
positive results).
Persian document (DPi) is classified by Persian classifier
and all English documents from same class for using in
similarity computation are extracted. The most similar
document along similarity rate of it for each Persian
document is determined. This is rational that we expect the
closed to 0 and in 200 parallel documents near to 1. For
final result the mean of all similarities in parallel and
unparallel groups are calculated as the table (2) shows.
Table 2: mean of similarities in parallel and unparallel
documents with sl= 15 and p=8
Tf based method Proposed method
Parallel 0.76 0.81
unparallel 0.35 0.09
First column in table (2) represents tradition method results
in which similarity of two documents is computed based on
words occurrences of a document in other one. In other
words this is a term frequency based method, also in this
case rephrasing is not performed. Considering, tf based
method has high precision in parallel documents matching,
but its error rate in unparallel documents are excessive.
Second column shows proposed method results that in this
method, term frequency doesn't have any influence on
similarity, and similarity is computed based on distance. As
results discloses, similarity rate for each group are
meaningful.
(5)
6. Conclusion
Plagiarism is a challenging problem in research domain and
academic comportment. For distinguishing plagiarist from
the researcher, automatic detection of plagiarism is
necessary. In this paper we developed a system for detection
of exact translation from English to Persian. In bi-lingual
plagiarism, in which system dealing with two different
languages that each word in one language has several
equivalences in the other. Thus selecting a suitable meaning
is essential. In proposed method, this is realized by
rephrasing task that inspired from crystallization. Structural
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Vol. 2, No. 6, June 2010

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