BIOPLAG: An Approach to Detect Programming Plagiarism

Abstract

This paper creates an approach to the automatic detection of plagiarism in programming by combining the interdisciplinary knowledge from bioinformatics with techniques such as: tokens of programming language elements, tokens mapping in synthetic biological sequence, and alignment of biological sequences. This solution, named BIOPLAG, contemplates different levels of modifications in source code, and its functioning depends on concepts of computer science as well. Through the realization of three experiments with students and programmers, a total of 168 real examples of plagiarism evaluated the implementation of BIOPLAG with the usage of 336 source codes in C language divided into seven scenarios. The evaluation process compared to other tools known as references in the literature: MOSS and JPLAG. The evaluative metrics used are precision, recall, and fmeasure. As a result, BIOPLAG showed to be the best in four and equal in three out of seven test scenarios. Its average score on the metrics in the evaluation process was 0.95 against MOSS with 0.83 and JPAG with 0.87.