Author Profiling and Plagiarism Detection

Abstract

In this paper we introduce the topics that we will cover in the RuSSIR 2014 course on Author Profiling and Plagiarism Detection (APPD). Author profiling distinguishes between classes of authors studying how language is shared by classes of people. This task helps in identifying profiling aspects such as gender, age, native language, or even personality type. In case of the plagiarism detection task we are not interested in studying how language is shared. On the contrary, given a document we are interested in investigating if the writing style changes in order to unveil text inconsistencies, i.e., unexpected irregularities through the document such as changes in vocabulary, style and text complexity. In fact, when it is not possible to retrieve the source document(s) where plagiarism has been committed from, the intrinsic analysis of the suspicious document is the only way to find evidence of plagiarism. The difficulty in retrieving the source of plagiarism could be due to the fact that the documents are not available on the web or the plagiarised text fragments were obfuscated via paraphrasing or translation (in case the source document was in another language). In this overview, we also discuss the results of the shared tasks on author profiling (gender and age identification) and plagiarism detection that we help to organise at the PAN Lab on Uncovering Plagiarism, Authorship, and Social Software Misuse (http://pan.webis.de).