APlag: A plagiarism checker for Arabic texts

Plagiarism is a serious problem, especially in academia and education. Detecting it is a challenging task, particularly in natural language texts. Many plagiarism detection tools have been developed for diverse natural languages, mainly English. Language-independent tools exist as well, but are considered as too restrictive as they usually do not consider specific language features. In this paper, we introduce APlag, a new plagiarism detection tool for Arabic texts, based on a logical representation of a document as paragraphs, sentences, and words, and new heuristics for text comparison. We describe its main attributes and present the results of some experiments conducted on a dummy test set. We demonstrate its effectiveness by comparing its performance to that of APD, a plagiarism detection tool for Arabic. Overall, preliminary results show that APlag significantly improves the results obtained by APD in terms of recall and precision metrics.