Automated Essay Spinning: an initial investigation

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Automated Essay Spinningan initial investigation

• Thomas Lancaster
• Robert Clarke
• School of Computing, Telecommunications and
  Networks
• Birmingham City University

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alternative title Can TurnItIn be beaten?
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Short Answer

• Yes!
• work modified with ALT-1055

the letter "e"s in a piece of work werereplaced
by the cyrillic letter "e"
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May 2008
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July 2009
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Long Answer

• Yes!
• spin the essay

version 3
version 1
version 4
version 2
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Article Spinning
a search engine optimization technique by which
blog or website owners attempt to manipulate
their rank on Google and other search engines
source Wikipedia.org
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The Tests

• Automatically spin essays into new versions.
• are they detected?
• Four spinning techniques.
• Three tools.
• Three corpora of documents.

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The Results
normalised scores overall combined corpus
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Google Translate
http//translate.google.com
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English -gt German
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German -gt English
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English -gt English
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Spinslate
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Spinslate
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Multiple Translation

• Produces text that is essentially regarded as
  original.
• Other essay spinning combinations may lead to
  more (or less) readable text.
• Text in its raw translated form is not brilliant
  ... but

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(No Transcript)
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A Step Further Contract Cheating
Assignments set in Greek. Work is posted in
English to be translated into Greek before
submission.
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Details in document attached to the posting
starts
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and concludes
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Trace evidence (in Word file) shows source of
assignments posted by this person.
Work history shows that requesting work set in
Greek has been carried out successfully several
times before.
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Bob Clarke est En Vacance
Lorna If they have fish, Ill try the catch of
the day
Bob If they have WiFi, Ill also try the catch
of the day
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Can TurnItIn be beaten?
Yes! (for now)
but, so can the cheats