A Method for Detecting Program Plagiarism Comparing Class Structure Graphs

Recently, lots of research results on program comparison have been reported since the code theft become frequent as the increase of code mobility. This paper proposes a plagiarism detection method using class structures. The proposed method constructs a graph representing the referential relationship between the member variables and the methods. This relationship is shown as a bipartite graph and the test for graph isomorphism is applied on the set of graphs to measure the similarity of the programs. In order to measure the effectiveness of this method, an experiment was conducted on the test set, the set of Java source codes submitted as solutions for the programming assignments in Object-Oriented Programming course of Pusan National University in 2012. In order to evaluate the accuracy of the proposed method, the F-measure is compared to those of JPlag and Stigmata. According to the experimental result, the F-measure of the proposed method is higher than those of JPlag and Stigmata by 0.17 and 0.34, respectively.