Translated and Paraphrased Plagiarism

The cat and mouse game continues...

One mans rigor is another mans mortis.
- CF Bohren and DR Huffman, 1983

Overview
The ever changing counterdetection landscape Paraphrasing versus textual entailment Ways to paraphrase Tools of the trade

Many Roads to Plagiarism The old fashioned way

Many Roads to Plagiarism Translated plagiarism.

Many Roads to Plagiarism Translated plagiarism.

Many Roads to Plagiarism Paraphrased plagiarism

Back-translation: the latest form of plagiarism
Michael Jones University of Wollongong, Australia

4th Asia Pacific Conference on Educational Integrity (4APCEI) 2830 September 2009

Paraphrased plagiarism is not new either. However, there are new tools to aid in automatically paraphrasing text which are accelerating this form of detection avoidance. Paraphrase plagiat n'est pas nouveau non plus. Toutefois, il existe de nouveaux outils pour l'aide dans le texte paraphrase automatiquement qui sont l'acclration de cette forme d'vasion de dtection. Paraphrase plagiarism is not new either. However, there are new tools to help in paraphrasing the text automatically, which are accelerating this form of escape detection.

Many Roads to Plagiarism Paraphrased plagiarism

Many Roads to Plagiarism Paraphrased plagiarism

Paraphrasing vs Textual Entailment

Two sentences are paraphrased if they mean the same thing: 1) Similarity: they share a substantial amount of information 2) Dissimilarities are extraneous: if extra information in the sentences exists, the effect of its removal is not signicant.

Paraphrasing vs Textual Entailment

A paraphrase is a special case of textual entailment. A paraphrase is reflexive whereas textual entailment indicates that two sentences overlap to a degree with one sentence being subsumed by the other.

Ways to Paraphrase
Lexical substitution/synonymy Hypo/Syno/Hyper-nym replacement: article, paper or red, crimson Acronym replacement: Mr., mister

Contractions: do not, dont

Compounding/decompounding: ballgame, ball game

Numeric/Alphabetic numbers: 11, eleven; 12/1/2010, December first two-thousand-ten

Ways to Paraphrase
Active and passive exchange The gangster killed 3 innocent people. vs Three innocent people are killed by the gangster. Re-ordering of sentence components Tuesday they met vs They met Tuesday
Zhou, Ming and Niu, Cheng. Principled Approach to Paraphrasing. U.S. Patent 11,934,010. 1 Nov 2007.

Ways to Paraphrase
Realization in different syntactic components
Palestinian leader Arafat vs Arafat, Palestinian leader Prepositional phrase attachment The Alabama plant vs A plant in Alabama
Zhou, Ming and Niu, Cheng. Principled Approach to Paraphrasing. U.S. Patent 11,934,010. 1 Nov 2007.

Ways to Paraphrase
Change into different sentence types Who drew this picture? vs Tell me who drew this picture. Morphological derivation He is a good teacher. vs He teaches well. vs He is good at teaching.
Zhou, Ming and Niu, Cheng. Principled Approach to Paraphrasing. U.S. Patent 11,934,010. 1 Nov 2007.

Ways to Paraphrase
Light verb construction
The film impressed him. vs The film made an impression on him. Comparatives vs. superlatives He is smarter than everyone else. vs He is the smartest one.
Zhou, Ming and Niu, Cheng. Principled Approach to Paraphrasing. U.S. Patent 11,934,010. 1 Nov 2007.

Ways to Paraphrase
Converse word substitution
John is Mary's husband. vs Mary is John's wife. Verb nominalization He wrote the book. vs He was the author of the book.
Zhou, Ming and Niu, Cheng. Principled Approach to Paraphrasing. U.S. Patent 11,934,010. 1 Nov 2007.

Ways to Paraphrase
Substitution using words with overlapping meanings
Bob excels at mathematics. vs Bob studies mathematics well. Inference He died of cancer. vs Cancer killed him.
Zhou, Ming and Niu, Cheng. Principled Approach to Paraphrasing. U.S. Patent 11,934,010. 1 Nov 2007.

Ways to Paraphrase
Different semantic role realization He enjoyed the game. vs The game pleased him. Subordinate clauses vs separate sentences lined by anaphoric pronouns. The tree healed its wounds by growing new bark. vs The tree healed its wounds. It grew new bark.

Zhou, Ming and Niu, Cheng. Principled Approach to Paraphrasing. U.S. Patent 11,934,010. 1 Nov 2007.

Tools of the Trade

Microsoft paraphrase corpus

Used to test algorithms

WordNet: English only :( Synonyms, hypernyms, hyponyms, and antonyms.

Algorithms: Finite State Transducers (FSTs) and/or iterative Longest Common Sequence (LCS) on sets.

Tools of the Trade

Stemming or lemmatization am, are, is be car

car, cars, car's, cars'

Word Alignment Examples

According to the MS paraphrase corpus:
This is a paraphrase

12/14 = 86% 12/16 = 75%

Not Paraphrased (However, the first sentence is textually entailed by the second. Turnitin would currently match this.)

18/19 = 95% 18/26 = 69%

Slippery Slope
When does textual entailment become arbitrary/noise?

14/48 = 29% 14/34 = 41%

Slippery Slope
When does textual entailment become arbitrary/noise?

13/24 = 54% 13/21 = 62%

Translated Plagiarism
Non-English markets, in particular, are concerned about their English as a second language students submitting English documents that have been translated to their native language.

Translated Plagiarism
Initial approach: Non-English documents searched as they are now Additional search performed: Translate document to English, search English documents, and then display English matches with translations (or vice versa)

Translated Plagiarism
Our new strategic partner:

On demand SaaS statistical machine translation

Translated Plagiarism: Need for Paraphrasing?

Machines and humans translate text in many different ways. Paraphrase detection allows us to match the variations.
Google translate: The zeitgeist is thinking and feeling one age. The term describes the characteristics of a particular period, or an attempt to remind us it. The German word Zeitgeist is transferred through English as a loanword into numerous other languages been.

Bing translate: Zeitgeist is thinking and feeling how an age. Is the nature of a particular era or trying to understand them. The German word Zeitgeist is taken from English as a loanword in many other languages.

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeitgeist

Possible Turnitin UI

Finis

Thank you for listening!

Questions?