Today, almost all educational institutions require original texts of term papers and theses, abstracts, reports and laboratory papers. In checking originality, everyone rely on text uniqueness (or anti-plagiarism) systems, but few understand how anti-plagiarism works.
So what do anti-plagiarism systems do? Let's figure it out.
Anti-plagiarism systems only check the uniqueness of the text
It's funny, but the notorious anti-plagiarism has nothing to do with checking the text for the presence of this very plagiarism. Judge for yourself: plagiarism is theft, that is, when you take something foreign and pass it off as yours. If any anti-plagiarism system is given two texts (original and rewritten), none of them will tell where the original is. Due to technical features, they can only determine the proportion of the borrowed text - any text that is on the Internet or in their own databases.
What about uniqueness?
Actually, this part of the borrowed text is the uniqueness. The less borrowing, the higher it is.
There are two types of uniqueness:
- Technical uniqueness . When they talk about the uniqueness of the text, in most cases they mean it. Such uniqueness is assessed by technical indicators such as text structure, typing and word order, and so on. At the same time, the meaning of the text can be non-unique and in one form or another appear in other materials.
- Semantic uniqueness . If the text contains information that was not available anywhere before, then it has a high semantic uniqueness. Anti-plagiarism systems ignore it, because in order to appreciate the semantic uniqueness, you need to understand the content. This uniqueness plays a role on the Internet, in texts read by thousands of people. And when they check educational work, they just slaughter it.
How systems check for text uniqueness
Anti-plagiarism systems use sophisticated algorithms to check for uniqueness. So its better to buy argumentative essay rather than copying it from web. The most-most common is the algorithm (or method) of shingles (from the English shingle, "flake").
The essence of this method is to find literal matches.
The program splits the text into small pieces (shingles), consisting of a certain number of words. At the same time, these pieces have common words with each other - they are like scales superimposed on each other, due to which not a single word remains unchecked.
For each shingle, a hash is calculated - a special unique set of letters and numbers, in which the content of this piece of text is encrypted, as it were. One text cannot contain two shingles with a unique hash.
And here's how the check happens: the service takes your text and the text that it considers to be similar, and starts comparing the hash of individual shingles. The more coincidences, the lower the uniqueness and the higher the probability that one of the texts is a copy of the other (maybe not completely, but partially).
Even slightly modified texts can be found using the shingle algorithm, which is why it is so popular. But not without drawbacks: the shingle method fails when it is necessary to isolate quotes, phraseological units and other stable expressions from the text. Therefore, if you try to check the text of educational work, say, on medicine, anti-plagiarism systems are likely to show low uniqueness - all due to the use of fixed expressions typical for the topic in the text. And everyone seems to understand that without such expressions, nowhere, but be so kind as to tighten the uniqueness.
In addition to the standard shingle method, services get sophisticated and add additional validation methods. For example, the lexical matching algorithm searches for similar terms and concepts in texts. And the pseudo-uniqueization algorithm helps to determine the text that has been processed using the uniqueness enhancement service.
Some uniqueness checking services have more advanced methods. For example, the anti-plagiarism system on Text.ru cannot be deceived simply by changing the order of sentences, phrases or words, changing cases, tenses, or adding new words to the text.
The easiest way to get good results when checking text for uniqueness is to write it yourself and rely on other materials to write my paper as little as possible. However, when you write an essay, term paper or diploma, it is difficult not to rely on books, manuals, and so on.
Our advice: just don't rip out whole chunks of text to insert into your classroom work. It is better to delve into the text, run it through yourself and write it down in your own words. And if you still have difficulties, EssaysWritingHelp specialists will be happy to help you do any educational work with a high level of uniqueness.
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