Detecting plagiarism in micro-blogging social networks

Fighting plagiarism can be an exhausting task. In the context of social networks, it is common that some users regularly copy the content prepared by others and exhibit them as own. In the higher education context, it is not different and it may be even more critical. In a write-to-learn approach, if students copying text of others get similar rewards as those doing the effort, it could be a cause of dis-encouragement for those working students. Despite the interest in anti-plagiarism tools, there are no anti-plagiarism libraries that allow a self-hosted solution. Existing APIs are commercial ones, and are not tailored for specific languages. The paper introduces a plagiarism detection tool developed using free resources and that has been integrated into Bolotweet, a social network for teaching support which allows to score student micro-annotations. The tool is prepared to compare micro-annotations and tell the similarity between one and others that were posted in the past. It aids the teacher to identify cheating students and also to provide consistency in the scoring. By identifying similar annotations, and informing which score was assigned, the teacher can generate similar scores to similar micro-annotations.