Text mining applied to plagiarism detection: The use of words for detecting deviations in the writing style

Plagiarism detection is of special interest to educational institutions, and with the proliferation of digital documents on the Web the use of computational systems for such a task has become important. While traditional methods for automatic detection of plagiarism compute the similarity measures on a document-to-document basis, this is not always possible since the potential source documents are not always available. We do text mining, exploring the use of words as a linguistic feature for analyzing a document by modeling the writing style present in it. The main goal is to discover deviations in the style, looking for segments of the document that could have been written by another person. This can be considered as a classification problem using self-based information where paragraphs with significant deviations in style are treated as outliers. This so-called intrinsic plagiarism detection approach does not need comparison against possible sources at all, and our model relies only on the use of words, so it is not language specific. We demonstrate that this feature shows promise in this area, achieving reasonable results compared to benchmark models. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.