SIMILARITY THRESHOLD TO DETECT PLAGIARISM IN SPANISH

• Published in: Revista electrónica de lingüística aplicada Vol. 13; no. 1; pp. 79 - 95
• Main Authors: Marquina, Montse, Queralt, Sheila
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Castello de la Plana Asociacion Espanola de Linguistica Aplicada 01-01-2014; Asociacion Espanola de Linguistica Aplicada, AESLA, Universidad de la Rioja
• Subjects: Academic discourse; detección del plagio; English language; español; estilo idiolectal; Genre; idiolectal style; Plagiarism; plagiarism detection; Similarity; Spanish language; Thresholds; umbral de singularidad; uniqueness threshold; Estados Unidos
• ISSN: 1885-9089; 1885-9089

Plagiarism is, unfortunately, a very common practice in today's society. This practice occurs in several areas: journalistic, educational, literary and scientific world, among others. Previous studies on the detection of plagiarism establish that it is unlikely that two authors write independently two identical sequences of more than seven words in English. This article examines whether this established similarity threshold in English can be applied into the Spanish language. In addition, the possible variability in the threshold according to the text genre in which the sequence has occurred been also taken into account in this study. For this reason, a selection of utterances in Spanish, from different genres (journalism, literary and scientific) has been analysed. Results show that the similarity threshold for the Spanish language is lower than for the English language regardless of genre. Findings of this study will contribute to furnish more reliable results in Court, in cases of plagiarism detection.