Aldholmi (2022), Plagiarism Detection Systems: From Linguistics to Ethics, King Saud University Journal of Arts, 34(3), 121-141.

مقال فى مجلة

2022

تم النشر فى: Aldholmi ResearchGate

Regardless of how much algorithmic complexity a Plagiarism Detection System (PDS) incorporates, artificial intelligence can still be outsmarted by human intelligence, and PDSs are thus likely to fail to capture some plagiarized works. Linguistically intelligent writers (and hence intelligent plagiarists) can turn a given passage into another one that sounds substantially both remote and different from the original even though the ideas remain identical in both texts. Likewise, plagiarizing from foreign information sources (i.e., cross-language plagiarism) often renders any PDS incapable of identifying plagiarism instances, especially if the two languages are highly distant. For these two major reasons, this paper, using samples of forensic linguistics findings and several ethical principles and approaches, argues that PDSs may raise some ethical concerns related to equality, justice, universalizability, reliability, and, ultimately, altruism. Specifically, PDSs give credit to prototypical plagiarists who use linguistic intelligence and give bilingual privilege to translingual plagiarists who intentionally use foreign information sources to evade or trick the system. The paper articulates some facets that must be considered when dealing with PDSs and concludes with a recommendation that an empirical study to survey plagiarists who have intentionally tricked a PDS and escaped the consequences be conducted to illustrate (or refute) those ethical concerns.