Architecture of Plagiarism Detection Service that Does Not Violate Intellectual Property of the Student

Abstract

Plagiarism detection services (PDS) have become a vital part of Learning Management Systems (LMS). Commercial or non-commercial PDS can be easily attached to the most popular LMS these days. In most such systems, to compare a submitted work with all possible sources on the Internet a university has to transfer the student submission to the third party. Such an approach is often criticized by students who may see a violation of copyright law in this process. This paper outlines an improved approach for PDS development that should allow universities to avoid such criticism. The major proposed alteration of the mainstream architecture of the improved PDS is a move of document preprocessing and search result clarification from the server side to the client side. Such a split allows users to submit only limited information to the third party, and to do so in a way that will not make it possible to fully recover the submitted work but will allow the PDS to maintain the same search quality.