A systematic study of knowledge graph analysis for cross-language plagiarism detection

•Study of the impact of the implicit aspects of knowledge graphs for cross-language plagiarism detection.•We present a new weighting scheme for relations between concepts based on distributed representations of concepts.•We obtain state-of-the-art performance compared to several state-of-the-art models.

Cross-language plagiarism detection aims to detect plagiarised fragments of text among documents in different languages. In this paper, we perform a systematic examination of Cross-language Knowledge Graph Analysis; an approach that represents text fragments using knowledge graphs as a language independent content model. We analyse the contributions to cross-language plagiarism detection of the different aspects covered by knowledge graphs: word sense disambiguation, vocabulary expansion, and representation by similarities with a collection of concepts. In addition, we study both the relevance of concepts and their relations when detecting plagiarism. Finally, as a key component of the knowledge graph construction, we present a new weighting scheme of relations between concepts based on distributed representations of concepts. Experimental results in Spanish–English and German–English plagiarism detection show state-of-the-art performance and provide interesting insights on the use of knowledge graphs.