Detect Plagiarism With This Friendly AI Bot
The next hit in literature, bearing the same name as Jane Austen’s 200-year-old masterpiece, Emma is not a book at all, but a completely modern AI.
This Emma – formally Emma Identity – created by computer science professor Alexander Marchenko, is the world’s first open source web application for attribution . Give her at least 5,000 words of written text and she will use over 50 math parameters to figure out who wrote those lines.
According to its developers, it provides an accuracy of 85% – the highest percentage that engineers have been able to achieve.
Marchenko told Digital Trends that “the technology combines natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning with stylometry, a study of linguistic style dating back to the 15th century.”
While the list of potential users ranges from journalists and lawyers to historians and the FBI (perhaps to track down blackmail note writers), educators are one of the main target audiences. Teachers and professors can use Emma’s skills to spot plagiarism they might suspect in student assignments.
Considering that various studies over the past 10 years have shown that anywhere from one-third to half of high school students have confessed to plagiarism, a tool like Emma can have a big impact in classrooms.
It is also a step up from the regular cut-and-paste Google search that many lower-level teachers still rely on, or even from discovery software such as TurnItIn, one of the most popular products for plagiarism detection all over the world.
Constant complaints from educators and software efficiency researchers such as HTW Berlin about software currently on the market have been about technology capable of detecting textual parallels by scanning text, but not actual plagiarism.
Emma’s ability to identify authorship with such high precision should reduce the number of false negatives and positives.
If you want to test the capabilities of Emma, she is now in beta testing, and you can try to trick her; first you teach it the original text, and then you compare other texts with it.
She has only one rule: no cheating.