Which Source Code Plagiarism Detection Approach is More Humane?

This paper contributes in developing source code plagiarism detection that is more aligned with human perspective. Three evaluation mechanisms that directly relate human perspective with evaluated approaches are proposed: think-aloud, aspect-oriented, and empirical mechanism. Using those mechanisms, a comparative study toward attribute-and structure-based plagiarism detection approach (i.e., two popular approach categories in source code plagiarism detection) is conducted. According to that study, structure-based approach is more effective than the attribute-based one; its signature aspect and resulted similarity degrees are more related to human preferences. In addition, such approach is related to most human-oriented aspects for suspecting source code plagiarism.