Visualising intra-corpal plagiarism

Describes the VAST (Visualisation and Analysis of Similarity Tool) prototype system, which tutors can use to investigate student submissions for intra-corpal plagiarism. VAST displays a pair of student submissions and a graphical representation of their similarity, allowing tutors to navigate directly to areas of potential plagiarism. It improves on the human-eye approach by identifying similarities which a tutor might otherwise miss, thus saving investigative time. VAST is demonstrated using noise-free synthetic texts and actual student submissions containing intra-corpal plagiarism. Associated ideas, including similarity visualisations, similarity intersections and the “four-stage plagiarism detection process” are also introduced