The Higher Education Commission’s recent efforts to increase the research output of Pakistani universities has resulted in an increasing number of publications in reputed journals and conferences (a comparison of recent research output of Bangladesh, Pakistan and India is available here). However, this success has also been accompanied with increasing instances of plagiarism involving Pakistani Professors and students. HEC deserves praise for its swift and strict response to these cases.
In the last couple of years, a number of online services and software have become available for plagiarism detection. An evaluation of available anti-plagiarism services conducted by the Claremont McKenna College is available online. However, till now, the subject of plagiarism and its automatic detection was not systematically studied by the academia itself. This has finally changed, with the announcement of the first “International Competition on Plagiarism Detection“. The competition carries a prize of 500 Euros, and will be hosted by the PAN workshop under the Annual Conference of the Spanish Society for Natural Language Processing 2009.
