Software Profile | Testoverview | Summary| Screenshots | Business Promotion | Links
Software Profile
| ID | C12-18 |
| Product | SPLaT |
| Company | Developed By: Christian Collberg, Stephen Kobourov, Joshua Louie, Thomas Slattery |
| Web Site | http://splat.cs.arizona.edu/ |
| Software Type | Desktop |
| Costs | Free |
| Test Date | 2012-06-20 |
Testoverview
| Ranking for all tests: | 2 |
| Ranking for Source Code Test: | 3 |
| Ranking for Text Test: | 4 |
| Summary: | useful |
Summary
The system SPLaT (Self-Plagiarism Tool) was developed at the University of Arizona. It is written in Java and can thus run on any platform that supports Java. The graphical interface is not what one would call pretty, there are very many parameters that can be set or changed and they are all crammed onto one screen.
The system converts known file types to text, and offers the possibility of installing a converter that can convert from other formats, such as PDF. Even though it does not construct a syntax tree for the candidates, it does compare them textually. The reason this system performed better than other textual comparison tools is that it checks the documents in both directions, that is, what parts of A are in B and what parts of B are in A. For the test cases that were set up, there was a partial complete match in at least one of the directions.
The system appears to analyze in minute detail. With other systems, changing just one word (for example, a variable name) would cause a larger portion to be skipped, SPLaT only skipped the exact characters that were different and continued right after. The price to pay for this attention to detail is the time that is necessary to check the papers. This time grows exponentially with the number of papers. The system needed 10 minutes for checking 89 files and then stopped calculating at 46 %.
As soon as the comparisons are finished, a window opens with the numbers and the file names. Clicking on a file name produces a side-by-side report that unfortunately only uses one color. The color can be changed, but it would have been better to have the individual fragments in different colors. There are many options for storing and printing the reports, although since there is only one color they can be difficult to read.
The system does, however, have problems with umlauts, making it difficult to use for German texts.
In summary, the system came in fourth for detecting code collusion and third for text collusion, so it is quite useful for use at university.
Screenshots
Screenshot 1: Side-By-Side View
Screenshot 2: A Lot of Settings
Screenshot 3: Doc Format is not supported
Business Promotion
„In either mode, SPlat checks the collected documents similarity, and all instances are reported to the user so that they may be investigated to determine if they are truly fraudulent papers. The tool is intended to generate warnings, all instances should be verified by an appropriate reviewer.“
Links
official website http://splat.cs.arizona.edu/
