Unmasking text plagiarism using syntactic-semantic based natural language processing techniques: Comparisons, analysis and challenges

The proposed work aims to explore and compare the potency of syntactic-semantic based linguistic structures in plagiarism detection using natural language processing techniques. The current work explores linguistic features, viz., part of speech tags, chunks and semantic roles in detecting plagiarized fragments and utilizes a combined syntactic-semantic similarity metric, which extracts the semantic concepts from WordNet lexical database. The linguistic information is utilized for effective pre-processing and for availing semantically relevant comparisons. Another major contribution is the analysis of the proposed approach on plagiarism cases of various complexity levels. The impact of plagiarism types and complexity levels, upon the features extracted is analyzed and discussed. Further, unlike the existing systems, which were evaluated on some limited data sets, the proposed approach is evaluated on a larger scale using the plagiarism corpus provided by PAN(1) competition from 2009 to 2014. The approach presented considerable improvement in comparison with the top-ranked systems of the respective years. The evaluation and analysis with various cases of plagiarism also reflected the supremacy of deeper linguistic features for identifying manually plagiarized data.