Which Source Code Plagiarism Detection Approach is More Humane?

Abstract: This paper contributes in developing source code plagiarism detection that is more aligned with human perspective. Three evaluation mechanisms that directly relate human perspective with evaluated approaches are proposed: think-aloud, aspect-oriented, and empirical mechanism. Using those mechanisms, a comparative study toward attribute-and structure-based plagiarism detection approach (i.e., two popular approach categories in source code plagiarism detection) is conducted. According to that study, structure-based approach is more effective than the attribute-based one; its signature aspect and resulted similarity degrees are more related to human preferences. In addition, such approach is related to most human-oriented aspects for suspecting source code plagiarism.