Multilingual plagiarism search

Pataki Máté <>
MTA SZTAKI

We encounter contents that are plagiarised or copied on a word-by-word basis more and more frequently, both in higher education and in scientific life. To find such contents several solutions have already been set up, of which KOPI Plagiarism Checker, operated by MTA SZTAKI DSD is the best-known in the Hungarian language (http://kopi.sztaki.hu/). However, the spread of the Internet and the fact that more people speak foreign languages generated a new form of plagiarism. Today most students can speak at least one foreign language – mainly English – on a level which enables them to find materials relevant to a given topic on foreign websites, and to translate them as well. This skill is also an expectation towards students, as today a thesis that does not contain reference to foreign language literature is not accepted by most universities, and/or faculties. Foreign language knowledge also gives students the opportunity to translate such materials and to use them, without giving their source, as an own idea, own piece of work instead of elaborating such materials. Given such situation, even when the teacher tries to check the suspicious part and enter a Hungarian sentence, web-based plagiarism checkers cannot locate a relevant English-language content. For this reason we strongly believe that it is time to move on from monolingual plagiarism checkers, and we have started a one-year research on how it is possible to clear a Hungarian text as an own piece of work by the student, or as a mere translation. We are going to demonstrate the results of our research in the presentation.