Multilingual plagiarism detection

Abstract

Multilingual text processing has been gaining more and more attention in recent years. This trend has been accentuated by the global integration of European states and the vanishing cultural and social boundaries. Multilingual text processing has become an important field bringing a lot of new and interesting problems. This paper describes a novel approach to multilingual plagiarism detection. We propose a new method called MLPlag for plagiarism detection in multilingual environment. This method is based on analysis of word positions. It utilizes the EuroWordNet thesaurus which transforms words into language independent form. This allows to identify documents plagiarized from sources written in other languages. Special techniques, such as semantic-based word normalization, were incorporated to refine our method. It identifies the replacement of synonyms used by plagiarists to hide the document match. We performed and evaluated our experiments on monolingual and multilingual corpora and results are presented in this paper. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2008.