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Summary: IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON EVOLUTIONARY COMPUTATION, VOL. 13, NO. 3, JUNE 2009 477
Towards the Validation of Plagiarism Detection Tools
by Means of Grammar Evolution
Manuel Cebrián, Manuel Alfonseca, and Alfonso Ortega
Abstract--Student plagiarism is a major problem in universi-
ties worldwide. In this paper, we focus on plagiarism in answers to
computer programming assignments, where students mix and/or
modify one or more original solutions to obtain counterfeits. Al-
though several software tools have been developed to help the te-
dious and time consuming task of detecting plagiarism, little has
been done to assess their quality, because determining the real au-
thorship of the whole submission corpus is practically impossible
for markers. In this paper, we present a Grammar Evolution tech-
nique which generates benchmarks for testing plagiarism detection
tools. Given a programming language, our technique generates a
set of original solutions to an assignment, together with a set of pla-
giarisms of the former set which mimic the basic plagiarism tech-
niques performed by students. The authorship of the submission
corpus is predefined by the user, providing a base for the assess-
ment and further comparison of copy-catching tools. We give em-
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