Plagiarism Detection

Today the results of the 4th International Competition on Plagiarism Detection Challenge PAN : http://pan.webis.de are declared. We [ I and my collogues] at DA-IICT are regular participants of the competition. Many people ask me that why are you working on this and its a solved problem so what is the scope of research in there?

Well there are pretty good challenges which still require good amount of research. Plagiariser may not be writing the document as a verbatim copy of some other text. He/She may copy the text or matter with slight or high modifications starting from simple addition or deletion of words to more complex manual paraphrasing. With the good translation facilities available, a plagiariser may also translate the contents from source documents. Another challenge may be what to consider as source documents, in some cases you may have to take whole web as source documents. There are plenty of commercial plagiarism detectors available but they are good only when the plagiarised passages are exact copies from the source documents.

Plagiarism Detection has always been a very computationally complex and resource-hungry task. Because it involves sentence to sentence matches [Please don't consider matches as exact matches] and sometimes the documents being compared are some MBs big of raw text.

With the last years proceedings of PAN, it can be seen that many people have tried very innovative ideas to handle above challenges. But translation seems to be still a big challenge.

From translation I can remember of another big challenge. The machine translation technology for Indian languages is still in its infancy phase. You may have read the news of google has extended support for more 5 indian languages in its translation facility but still the quality of machine translation is very bad compared to European languages. You may try it there using some complex or long english statement and trying to translate it in hindi or so.

One such interesting challenge is going to happen in FIRE at IIT Bombay and the task name is CL!TR and its webpage is http://users.dsic.upv.es/grupos/nle/fire-workshop-clitr.html.

Listening to Your Heart!

One thought dwindled in my mind for last couple of months, that Am I doing What I really want to Do? You may also think of it in this way that you really want to go out for some great natural pictures if you are a photography lover, or you may just want to sit with your guitar and want to try some great songs, or you wanna see whole bunch of movies in your 1 TB hard disk in one week or may be you wanna code something really useful and wanna produce your masterpiece. You may feel indifferent if what you wanna do is not listed above but if its there then you may certainly feel excited. We will consider all those things you want to do as listening to your heart. So you really want to do something but something is stopping you from doing it may it be your job or studies or laziness or any thing. But you should really ask this question to yourself that is it worth not listening to your heart?

I am just coding for my Google Summer of Code project in my college lab and got struck in one nasty error, which I just managed to solve after playing with it for last 5 hours. A sudden smile came to my face as I solved it and that inspired me to share this thought with you all. We can be really very happy if we choose to work what we really like. It is very rare that you get a profession which is very close to something what you really wanted to do in your heart and if you belong to that set then all cheers and you are enjoying what I mean. But if you don't fall in that category then you really should listen to your heart and figure out what is stopping you from doing it and take some time out of your routine and plunge into hearty desires. You will smile someday. Its true. And best thing about it is, smile doesn't take much long to come and you will enjoy.

Another benefit of doing this is you spend some time with yourself, and a bit away from those social networks and you get to enjoy some eternal moments which exclusively created by you and exclusively for you which you really don't want to flaunt on those profiles.

So the idea is you must listen to your heart i.e. should do something what you really like. That may fetch a great happiness to you and sometimes recognition is a by-product of the process.

Great Entries at "A Day in India" Campaign of TOI

Earlier I posted on the "A Day in India" campaign of TOI. Now portal has made the entries public. There you will find some videos, photos, cartoons etc on various themes. They may not be that artistic but surely will let you feel something for India. Looking at some of the pictures you may feel pity or shame or proud or a sudden smile may drop by your face. Ultimately you will enjoy.

Well this campaign is little bit nostalgic to me because I was also once upon a time associated with a "Theme based photography contest" called 'Clickerzparadise'. :) !

Yeah don't forget to check the entries out at http://adayinlife.timesofindia.com/photos

F.A.L.T.U : A Plagiarised movie from Hollywood movie 'Accepted' : Who will detect Plagiarism?

Those who have seen movie F.A.L.TU. may want to know the fact that it strongly resembles with the Hollywood Flick 'Accepted [2006]'.






"A high school slacker who's rejected by every school he applies to opts to create his own institution of higher learning, the South Harmon Institute of Technology, on a rundown piece of property near his hometown." [IMDB Page of 'Accepted']

Don't these lines make you think of the plot of Bollywood movie F.A.L.T.U? Yes its true, its the same story with a little makeover and in my opinion, they had to do those changes because they were inefficient even to reproduce the same story :D . Well I seriously pity on the debutant director who starts the career from such a plagiarised story and talks about creativity and passion in the movie.

This is not the only plagiarised movie, The list is long and includes some of the big names like 'Gajni' from 'Memento', 'Partner' from 'Hitch' . Sometimes songs are copied from some other songs, and our Anu Malik and Pritam are famous for that.

Plagiarism is prominent also in text, like we use someone else's work or text without explicitly acknowledging the person or source. “You know the feeling while reading an article on a topic related to your own research, you gradually become aware of a strong similarity between the ideas expressed and those you published some time ago. A quick glance at the references cited shows you that your article isn’t mentioned. ”[Garfield, 1980]. Here, as I have given the reference to Garfield so it is not Plagiarism! You may find it very frequent in student reports, even there are very funny cases like professor publishing book from the Ph.D thesis of his/her student.

As one of my research area is Natural Language Processing and somewhat plagiarism detection in text, this kind of incidents provoke me to write something about it. Plagiarism Detection has much moral and social impact than merely a profitable application. Because we help directly the society by making life of the plagiariser hard and promote the original work at the same time make the environment more ethical and authentic.

I sign off with a hope not to come across such cases again!

A day in the Life of India!

You may find very interesting things about India at the following link. It is the initiative of Times of India.

A very sarcastic view of India presented there and one should not take it as a disrespect to the nation. You may love it. It captures lot of such scenes where you would utter to the next guy "Yeh India hai Bhai!!"

http://adayinlife.timesofindia.com/