Cross-language plagiarism detection over continuous-space- and knowledge graph-based representations of language

Cross-language (CL) plagiarism detection aims at detecting plagiarised fragments of text among documents in different languages. The main research question of this work is on whether knowledge graph representations and continuous space representations can complement to each other and improve the state-of-the-art performance in CL plagiarism detection methods. In this sense, we propose and evaluate hybrid models to assess the semantic similarity of two segments of text in different languages. The proposed hybrid models combine knowledge graph representations with continuous space representations aiming at exploiting their complementarity in capturing different aspects of cross-lingual similarity. We also present the continuous word alignment-based similarity analysis, a new model to estimate similarity between text fragments. We compare the aforementioned approaches with several state-of-the-art models in the task of CL plagiarism detection and study their performance in detecting different length and obfuscation types of plagiarism cases. We conduct experiments over Spanish-English and German-English datasets. Experimental results show that continuous representations allow the continuous word alignment-based similarity analysis model to obtain competitive results and the knowledge-based document similarity model to outperform the state-of-the-art in CL plagiarism detection.