Design Patterns Based Pre-processing of Source Code for Plagiarism Detection

Plagiarism detection in software programs is very important in both academia and industry. There are many tools available today to aid in detecting plagiarism in text and source documents. Most of the plagiarism detection tools for source code do some sort of pre-processing, like removing comments & blank spaces and using uniform tokens for primitive types & variables, before actually applying intelligent matching techniques so that the tool can detect the copied code even if it is changed in format and variable names etc. In this paper, we propose a novel preprocessing approach based on design patterns such that any code that is intelligently plagiarized can also be easily located.