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Visualizing program similarity in the Ac plagiarism detection system

Published: 28 May 2008 Publication History

Abstract

Programming assignments are easy to plagiarize in such a way as to foil casual reading by graders. Graders can resort to automatic plagiarism detection systems, which can generate a "distance" matrix that covers all possible pairings. Most plagiarism detection programs then present this information as a simple ranked list, losing valuable information in the process.
The Ac system uses the whole distance matrix to provide graders with multiple linked visualizations. The graph representation can be used to explore clusters of highly related submissions at different filtering levels. The histogram representation presents compact "individual" histograms for each submission, complementing the graph representation in aiding graders during analysis.
Although Ac's visualizations were developed with plagiarism detection in mind, they should also prove effective to visualize distance matrices from other domains, as demonstrated by preliminary experiments.

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cover image ACM Conferences
AVI '08: Proceedings of the working conference on Advanced visual interfaces
May 2008
483 pages
ISBN:9781605581415
DOI:10.1145/1385569
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Published: 28 May 2008

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  1. software plagiarism
  2. visualization

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Overall Acceptance Rate 128 of 490 submissions, 26%

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  • (2020)AlignVis: Semi-automatic Alignment and Visualization of Parallel Translations2020 24th International Conference Information Visualisation (IV)10.1109/IV51561.2020.00026(98-108)Online publication date: Sep-2020
  • (2019)Source-code Similarity Detection and Detection Tools Used in AcademiaACM Transactions on Computing Education10.1145/331329019:3(1-37)Online publication date: 21-May-2019
  • (2017)Constructive Visual Analytics for Text Similarity DetectionComputer Graphics Forum10.1111/cgf.1279836:1(237-248)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2017
  • (2017)Plagiarism detection in learning management system2017 8th International Conference on Information Technology (ICIT)10.1109/ICITECH.2017.8080048(495-500)Online publication date: May-2017
  • (2016)Evaluating plagiarism detection software for introductory programming assignmentsProceedings of the Computer Science Education Research Conference 201610.1145/2998551.2998558(37-46)Online publication date: 4-Jul-2016
  • (2012)Instructor-centric source code plagiarism detection and plagiarism corpusProceedings of the 17th ACM annual conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education10.1145/2325296.2325328(122-127)Online publication date: 3-Jul-2012
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  • (2011)Programming plagiarism as a social phenomenon2011 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON)10.1109/EDUCON.2011.5773251(895-902)Online publication date: Apr-2011
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