Plagiarism Checker

Inspiration

In this current day and age, information can be easily found online. With a click of a button, millions of webpages appear and information is limitless. Due to the Internet's accessibility, copying stuff from the Internet has never been easier. Based on a survey by the Josephson Institute Center for Youth Ethics, one out of three high school students admitted that they used the Internet to plagiarise an assignment. That is quite a large proportion of students plagiarising! To counter that, I decided to build this plagiarism checker. Unlike other plagiarism checkers, this plagiarism checker can check for plagiarism in written assignments. As most assignments are still in written form, this plagiarism checker would be useful for teachers to check their students' work for plagiarism.

What it does

It takes in an image in the form of a URL, converts it to text, and checks for plagiarism against a list of news articles from various sources using a similarity test.

How I built it

I used Python to build it, used Optiic to convert image to text, and used News API to get the news articles for the program to check the text for plagiarism against.

Challenges I ran into

I initially wanted to make this into a website. However, as I am not that well-versed in web development and ran into many problems trying to get it to work, I decided to just make this a Python program.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I'm proud of getting this whole thing to work, and to have finished the project on time. To me, this project has pushed my limits and made me stepped out of my comfort zone and experience things I've never tried, code I've never written, and frameworks I've never touched. Although, I was not able to implement these new things I've learnt or tried, at least the plagiarism checking works.

What I learned

As mentioned above, I've tried out so many new things this hackathon and have learnt many new things like new programming languages, new frameworks, more about machine learning and more. I'm determined to continue to step out of my comfort zone and try new things. I have to thank the organisers who made this hackathon worked out. Thanks to you, I was able to learn all these.

What's next for Plagiarism Checker

Plagiarism Checker is still in development and still has much to improve on. Firstly, I would like to make this into a website, and allow the user to upload their image directly onto the website. After uploading, the user would be able to edit the text and make sure it is correct, before the program checks for plagiarism. Secondly, I would like the program to be able to search the entire Internet for plagiarism, instead of the news articles now. This would increase the plagiarism checker's viability as it could identify plagiarism from more sources. Thirdly, I would like to improve on the plagiarism checking using machine learning. This would be able to identify plagiarised texts more accurately.

Built With

• newsapi
• optiic
• python