Efficient plagiarism detection for software modeling assignments

ABSTRACT

Background and Context

Reports suggest plagiarism is a common occurrence in universities. While plagiarism detection mechanisms exist for textual artifacts, this is less so for non-code related ones such as software design artifacts like models, metamodels or model transformations.

Objective

To provide an efficient mechanism for the detection of plagiarism in repositories of Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) assignments.

Method

Our approach is based on the adaptation of the Locality Sensitive Hashing, an approximate nearest neighbor search mechanism, to the modeling technical space. We evaluate our approach on a real use case consisting of two repositories containing 10 years of student answers to MDE course assignments.

Findings

We have found that: $(i)$ effectively, plagiarism occurred on the aforementioned course assignments $(ii)$ our tool was able to efficiently detect them.

Implications

Plagiarism detection must be integrated into the toolset and activities of MDE instructors in order to correctly evaluate students

KEYWORDS:

• Model-driven engineering
• robust hashing
• locality sensitive hashing
• clustering
• plagiarism detection

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. www.mdse-book.com.

2. https://gitlab.com/smartine/RobustModelHashing/tree/master/LSHForModels.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Salvador Martínez

Salvador Martínez is an Associate Professor at IMT Atlantique (École nationale supérieure Mines-Télécom Atlantique Bretagne Pays de la Loire), France. Previously he was a postdoctoral Researcher at the CEA-LIST LISE laboratory in collaboration with the SOM research group at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, working on the integration of security concerns on the artefacts of the model-driven environment. Formerly, he worked as associate professor in the École des Mines de Nantes (France). He obtained his Ph.D on the reverse engineering of security policies in 2014 from the École des Mines de Nantes (France). He has also a research expertise in core Model-Driven Engineering technologies such as the efficient execution of model transformations as well as in Software Evolution with a focus on Security concerns (concretely, in access-control policies). He has been involved in the European OPEES (ITEA) and MONDO (FP7) projects.

Manuel Wimmer

Manuel Wimmer is Full Professor and Head of the Department of Business Informatics – Software Engineering at JKU Linz, Austria. He received his Ph.D. and his Habilitation from TU Wien. He has been a research associate at the University of Malaga, Spain, a visiting professor at the University of Marburg, Germany as well as at TU Munich, Germany, and an assistant professor at the Business Informatics Group (BIG), TU Wien, Austria. Currently, he is also leading the Christian Doppler Laboratoy on Model-Integrated Smart Production (CDL-MINT) which is running from 2017 to 2023. In this context, he is developing modeling approaches for smart production facilities, as well as techniques for the continuous evolution of such systems based on production information gathered and analyzed at runtime. He is also a founding member of the EU COST Action Multi-Paradigm Modeling for Cyber-Physical Systems (MPM4CPS) and a representative within the AutomationML society. Furthermore, he is participating in the NFR4MDD project, a multi-national empirical study on the integration status of Non-Functional Requirements (NFR) in Model-Driven Development (MDD) practices.

Jordi Cabot

Jordi Cabot ICREA Research Professor at Internet Interdisciplinary Institute, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. Previously, he was leader of an INRIA and LINA research group at École des Mines de Nantes (France), a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Toronto, a senior lecturer at the UOC (Open University of Catalonia) and a visiting scholar at the Politecnico di Milano. He received the BSc and PhD degrees in Computer Science from the Technical University of Catalonia. His research interests include software and systems modeling, model-driven and web engineering, formal verification and social aspects of software engineering, topics on which he has published over 150 peer-reviewed conference and journal papers. He is currently leading the SOM research group at UOC. He is the PI of the national Spanish project ODA ('Open data for all') and leads the team participation in the ECSEL EU project MegaMart2 and represents the UOC in international networks and consortiums, including the Eclipse Polarsys group and the Papyrus Industrial Consortium. Apart from his scientific publications in international conferences and journals in these areas, he writes and blogs about all these topics in his Modeling Languages portal (http://modeling-languages.com).