Corinna Breitinger, Bela Gipp, Norman Meuschke
We are happy to announce that the DFG (German Research Foundation), has awarded our group a research grant for our project: “Analyzing Mathematics to Detect Disguised Academic Plagiarism”. The total funding sum of 633,000 Euro will be made available over a 3-year period to both Bela Gipp’s DKE Group at the University of Wuppertal and to Dr. Moritz Schubotz, a former DKE group member, now working at the FIZ Karlsruhe – Leibniz-Institute for Information Infrastructure. Significant earlier work carried out by Norman Meuschke and Corinna Breitinger has led to the realization of this DFG project.
The goal of this collaborative DFG-funded project will be to improve academic plagiarism detection methods for heavily disguised forms of plagiarism, including paraphrases, translations, or idea plagiarism. Our focus will be on texts and publications from the STEM-field, i.e. the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics domain, since texts from these domains contain valuable semantic information encoded in the form of mathematical expressions, which are not being considered by existing approaches for plagiarism detection. We will conduct fundamental research on analyzing mathematical expressions as text-independent and language-independent features to help identify potentially suspicious similarity among documents.
We plan to combine our novel mathematics-based approach to plagiarism detection with both text-based and citation-based detection approaches, which we have developed in previous research. During this project, the research team will thus collaborate closely with researchers from Bela Gipp’s other DFG-funded project “Methods and Tools to Advance the Retrieval of Mathematical Knowledge from Digital Libraries for Search-, Recommendation- and Assistance-Systems”.