The programme of Brno-based Masaryk University (MU) has won an international competition of plagiarism detecting software entered by 17 teams from all over the world. The MU system detected the highest number of copied passages.
The team of experts from MU Faculty of Informatics came second last year. "We have made a number of changes and improvements, the most important of which is perhaps the detection of passages copied from foreign-language sources," Jan Kasprzak, from the development team, said. "Our scientists also focused on eliminating similar, but not copied parts of texts, such as imprints, prefaces and others," he said. Another novelty is the addition of an experimental support for detecting plagiarism on the basis of detection of changes in writing style. The university introduced the plagiarism detector in 2006. The Theses.cz project detecting plagiarism in graduates' works was the first to be launched. A few years later the university added the Odevzdej.cz project focused on seminar papers. The systems are used by another 30 schools across the Czech Republic.