Optimized Fuzzy Text Alignment for Plagiarism Detection

This paper describes a method for plagiarism detection based on a fuzzy alignment between a given pair of documents. The proposed method assigns a weight to each word of the suspicious document according to the straightness of its alignment to the source document; this weight is used as a kind of plagiarism probability measure for each word of the suspicious document. The paper also presents a strategy to optimize the alignment of the two documents based on the evaluation of all possible matches in a limited context. Evaluation results on the test set of the PAN corpus show that the method is relatively fast and that it could detect 35% of the plagiarized words with accuracy greater than 50%.