Danish high schools currently use the Lectio platform to check if a student has handed in plagiarized work with passages copied directly from a previously submitted assignment. High schools have a harder time discovering if a student has enlisted someone else to write the assignment for them, something that happens to a more or less systematized degree via online services. The case of the SRP, a major written assignment in the final year of Danish high school, is particularly telling. Because the assignment counts for double, students have gone as far as tendering out their writing assignments on the Danish classified website, Den Blå Avis.
"The problem today is that if someone is hired to write an assignment, Lectio won't spot it. Our program identifies discrepancies in writing styles by comparing recently submitted writing against a student's previously submitted work. Among other variables, the program looks at: word length, sentence structure and how words are used. For instance, whether 'for example' is written as 'ex." or 'e.g.,"" explains Ph.D. student Stephan Lorenzen of the Department of Computer Science. He, along with the rest of the DIKU-DABAI research group, recently presented their findings at a major European AI conference.
Prior to setting the trap, an ethical debate
The program, Ghostwriter, is built around machine learning and neural networks—branches of artificial intelligence that are particularly useful for recognizing patterns in images and texts. MaCom, the company that provides Lectio to Danish high schools, has made a dataset of 130,000 written assignments from 10,000 high school students available to Ghostwriter project researchers at the Department of Computer Science. For now, it is still a research project.
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