Tuesday, January 8, 2008

BitScan

PlagiarismToday alerted me to a new software for plagiarism detection, BitScan. Since it just wanted URLs and 20 tests were free, I couldn't resist trying a few of my tests on the quick:
  • Viking - a trivial shake-and-paste plagiarism of one source: the source and only the source was found
  • Döner - a complicated three-source plagiarism with Wikipedia: two mirrors of Wikipedia found, no other sources
  • Jelinek - another three-source plagiarism with an automatic translation: one of the three sources found as the only source
  • Djembe - an impossible (for machines) machine translation: nothing found
  • Lettau - an easy plagiarism of the German Wikipedia (his publication list also appears 1:1 in the English-language Wikipedia: nothing found
  • Blogs - a plagiarism from a pdf: nothing found
  • Atwood - a trivial plagiarism from Amazon: found, along with some copies
Okay, that's about par for the course. Flipping a coin is at least as good. I will put it on my list for a future test, though. Maybe they will have done some fine-tuning by then.
Posted by at 7:58 PM
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1 comment:

  1. AnonymousJanuary 8, 2008 at 10:00:00 PM GMT+1

    To be completely fair to them, they did say that they were still tuning the product and that is why they were wanting people to pound on it. I'm going to be sure to forward your results on to them so they can analyze and improve.

    If they are as good as most now, well, perhaps they can be better than most after refining. Admittedly that is a low bar, but hey, gotta start somewhere right?

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