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How Technology is Revolutionizing Plagiarism Checking

Plagiarism is a tempting act for students or anyone who is pressed for time when writing a paper or document. That is because it makes things easier–it does not require too much thinking. In fact, a study conducted by the International Center for Academic Integrity with Dr. Donald McCabe showed that among 71,300 undergraduate students, 62% admitted to cheating in papers while among 17,000 graduate students, 40% did. This is an astounding number, which shows how difficult it can be for instructors to make sure that students turn in assignments that do not have plagiarized sections.

This act is not limited only to the academic sphere, though. It can also be rampant in the workplace whether by accident or design. Additionally, plagiarism is not just about the lifting of words from another source–it also involves using other peoples’ images, ‘owning’ another person’s idea, and not crediting a source or reference. Chron.com also relates that using the content of another blog for one’s own is considered plagiarism as well. 

But there is a way to combat this: plagiarism checking software. This lets users upload documents or copy texts to its interface and click a button for analysis. It would then provide information on how much of the content is original and how much is plagiarized or has duplicates on the web. 

That is only possible because of the innovations under the hood of plagiarism and duplicate checkers. There is AI, machine learning, natural language processing, and more. You can learn more about these technologies and how they power the software people use to check for copying issues. 

  • AI for smart detection – Artificial intelligence is in use in many facets of our lives, from our smartphones and smart digital assistants to our smart home devices. Apart from those objects, AI is also present in many software we use such as plagiarism checker software. Applications such as these utilize this advanced technology to detect content that may bear any similarity to previously published texts. No matter how they have been rearranged or paraphrase carefully, a powerful AI system can determine whether or not content has been copied from another source or has duplicates in the web across different platforms.
  • Machine learning for continuous improvement – AI and machine learning are often bundled together in devices and software. Indeed, in a SaaS solutions analysis, it is revealed that cloud applications are equipped with either or both. However, these two are not interchangeable. Instead, they complement each other. AI paves the way for smart plagiarism or duplicate detection while machine learning learns more about the needs of a user by reading their actions and adjusting its predictive models to provide accurate scan results in the future.  In application to plagiarism or duplication detection solutions, machine learning identifies potential cases by drawing information from a database. It would then create a model based on the searches and train itself to be meticulous. 
    • Natural language processing for intelligent analysis – Each person may have a unique writing style that could affect the analysis done by plagiarism checking tools. Fortunately, modern incarnations of the application have become powerful because of the addition of natural language processing (NLP). This technology allows computer systems to understand the way humans usually speak to create better processes for translation, sentiment analysis, summarization, and many others.  When it comes to plagiarism, this innovation reads the way people write not just in academic and professional manners but in social and natural ways as well. Because of this, the system can cross-reference texts and make sure that there is no copied content.
    • Stylometry for unique writing style consideration – Stylometry is a statistical approach to plagiarism or duplicate data detection. When a plagiarism tool works with this method, it can take into account writers’ unique writing styles, including work note-taking. This allows it to determine whether a text is written by the same author or if another writer’s style has been copied. To do that, it compares segments and paragraphs of different works. Apart from plagiarism detection, this procedure is also used to ascertain the authorship of different texts to prevent conflicts in this regard.
    • Fuzzy string searching for matching patterns – Fuzzy string searching or approximate string matching is a technique in computer science that finds matching patterns. It does so approximately rather than exactly. This is commonly used in dictionaries and in search engines, which help you discover the right results in case you misspelled terms or wrote similarly spelled words.  Until recently, this has been used solely for spell checking. But this is also applicable to plagiarism checking software because it can identify similarities in texts, too.
    • Database for accurate checks – There are now over 1.7 billion websites live on the Internet, according to Internet Live Stats. Each website itself is likely to have multiple pages that would contain texts. These, together with resources like documents uploaded to the cloud, would amount to over 60 trillion pages online across the web contained in databases. 

    The best free plagiarism checker is capable of sifting through all that information. It can have a plagiarism database to which it can compare the text or document uploaded to its platform. With this, you can be confident that your content is unique before you share it in any form publicly. 

    Furthermore, in case there are matches, your software would be able to tell you which parts have similarities so that you can resolve them with ease. 

    • API for fast application interaction – An application programming interface is a technology that allows different programs to communicate with each other. As long as platforms have support for this, anti-plagiarism tools can integrate with them. This way, you can implement employee blogging rules stringently because users only have to click a single button to analyze texts for possible duplicates. This also means that you do not have to copy and paste or upload files to the plagiarism checking system to conduct your analysis, thus saving you time and effort. 

    Maintaining integrity with plagiarism checking software

    There will always be eagle-eyed people in an organization or on the web who would be able to identify plagiarized content, uncredited ideas, and unspecified sources. This could lead to a backlash that could hurt the reputation of a business, regardless of its size. Because even if you did not mean it, the public would only see the mistake that you made.

    That is why it is imperative to always check for plagiarized or duplicate sections. And this is where smart software comes in. You do not even have to pay a premium price to use such a tool because there are free tools available on the web. They can provide insights regarding the sections that are possibly plagiarized so that you can remove or revise them as soon as you can. Copyleaks lets users scan textual content for up to 10 pages per month for plagiarism for free.

    However, if you require more powerful features such as a detailed analysis of texts in the same or different languages, there are always economical solutions available on the web. Copyleaks offers various plans designed to fit higher volumes to fit different needs. By signing up for this, you can protect your business interests and continue to conduct your operations into the far future. 

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