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Automated Essay Spinning: an initial investigation. Thomas Lancaster Robert Clarke School of Computing, Telecommunications and Networks Birmingham City University. * alternative title * Can TurnItIn be beaten?. Short Answer. Yes! work modified with ALT-1055.
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Automated Essay Spinning:an initial investigation Thomas Lancaster Robert Clarke School of Computing, Telecommunications and Networks Birmingham City University
Short Answer Yes! work modified with ALT-1055 the letter "e"s in a piece of work werereplaced by the cyrillic letter "e"
Long Answer Yes! spin the essay version 3 version 1 version 4 version 2
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
The Tests • Automatically spin essays into new versions. • are they detected? • Four spinning techniques. • Three tools. • Three corpora of documents.
The Results normalised scores overall combined corpus
Google Translate http://translate.google.com
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 …
A Step Further: Contract Cheating Assignments set in Greek. Work is posted in English to be translated into Greek before submission.
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.
Bob Clarke est En Vacance Lorna: “If they have fish, I’ll try the catch of the day” Bob: “If they have WiFi, I’ll also try the catch of the day”
Can TurnItIn be beaten? Yes! (for now) but, so can the cheats