Unicheck (previously known as Unplag) is a

cloud-based Cloud computing is "a paradigm for enabling network access to a scalable and elastic pool of shareable physical or virtual resources with self-service provisioning and administration on-demand," according to International Organization for ...

plagiarism Plagiarism is the representation of another person's language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions as one's own original work.From the 1995 ''Random House Dictionary of the English Language, Random House Compact Unabridged Dictionary'': use or close ...

detection

software Software consists of computer programs that instruct the Execution (computing), execution of a computer. Software also includes design documents and specifications. The history of software is closely tied to the development of digital comput ...

that finds similarities,

citation A citation is a reference to a source. More precisely, a citation is an abbreviated alphanumeric expression embedded in the body of an intellectual work that denotes an entry in the bibliographic references section of the work for the purpose o ...

s and

reference A reference is a relationship between objects in which one object designates, or acts as a means by which to connect to or link to, another object. The first object in this relation is said to ''refer to'' the second object. It is called a ''nam ...

s in texts. Unicheck is primarily used in

K-12 K-1 is a professional kickboxing promotion established in 1993 by karateka Kazuyoshi Ishii. Originally under the ownership of the Fighting and Entertainment Group (FEG), K-1 was considered to be the largest Kickboxing organization in the world. ...

and

higher education Tertiary education (higher education, or post-secondary education) is the educational level following the completion of secondary education. The World Bank defines tertiary education as including universities, colleges, and vocational schools ...

, and is utilised by more than 400 institutions worldwide. The tool is also used as a stand-alone checker by individual users like writers, editors, bloggers and lawyers.

History

Unicheck was produced and launched by IT company Phase One Karma in 2014 under the name Unplag. In 2016 Unicheck partnered with the XСulture project and became a Certified Partner with the Canvas learning management system by

Instructure Instructure Holdings, Inc. is an educational technology company based in Salt Lake City, Utah, United States. It is the developer and publisher of Canvas, a web-based learning management system (LMS). History The company was founded in 2008 by ...

(in 2017 it gained a status of Canvas Alliance Partner). In the summer of 2017, Unicheck became the first plagiarism checker to integrate with Google Classroom. It has also released a new type of integration with Canvas, called “native” and based on both LTI and

API An application programming interface (API) is a connection between computers or between computer programs. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how to build ...

. After that in January 2018 Unicheck released an Add-on for Google Docs. In 2020, Unicheck created by Phase One Karma was acquired by Turnitin. Unicheck will continue to operate as a separate plagiarism service.

Functionality

Unicheck offers search and recognition functionality for similarities,

s, and

s in texts. It can also discover characters that have been replaced in the text from another

alphabet An alphabet is a standard set of letter (alphabet), letters written to represent particular sounds in a spoken language. Specifically, letters largely correspond to phonemes as the smallest sound segments that can distinguish one word from a ...

— for example, similar characters from the

Cyrillic The Cyrillic script ( ) is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic, Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic, Caucasian and Iranic-speaking countries in Southeastern Europe, Ea ...

and

Latin Latin ( or ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally spoken by the Latins (Italic tribe), Latins in Latium (now known as Lazio), the lower Tiber area aroun ...

alphabets. To find similarities and paraphrases, checks are performed against the Internet (web pages indexed by

Yahoo Yahoo (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web portal that provides the search engine Yahoo Search and related services including My Yahoo, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, y!entertainment, yahoo!life, an ...

and

Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

repositories, and user's internal library or

database In computing, a database is an organized collection of data or a type of data store based on the use of a database management system (DBMS), the software that interacts with end users, applications, and the database itself to capture and a ...

. The check results are presented as a similarity

report A report is a document or a statement that presents information in an organized format for a specific audience and purpose. Although summaries of reports may be delivered orally, complete reports are usually given in the form of written documen ...

, where each of the similarities that have been found has a link to the source. These reports can be downloaded as

PDF Portable document format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe Inc., Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, computer hardware, ...

documents. Unicheck can be used as a stand-alone online tool, or integrated into an LMS (Learning Management System) via plugin, LTI,

or LTI+API types of integrations. Unicheck is compatible with the following file formats: .doc, .docx, .rtf, .txt, .odt,

.ppt Microsoft PowerPoint is a presentation program, developed by Microsoft. It was originally created by Robert Gaskins, Tom Rudkin, and Dennis Austin at a software company named Forethought, Inc. It was released on April 20, 1987, initiall ...

.pptx The Office Open XML file formats are a set of file formats that can be used to represent electronic office documents. There are formats for word processing documents, spreadsheets and presentations as well as specific formats for material su ...

, .html, .pdf, .pages, .gdoc, as well as rar and zip archives, and files uploaded from

Google Drive Google Drive is a file-hosting service and synchronization service developed by Google. Launched on April 24, 2012, Google Drive allows users to store files in the cloud (on Google servers), synchronize files across devices, and share files ...

oneDrive Microsoft OneDrive is a file-hosting service operated by Microsoft. First released as SkyDrive in August 2007, it allows registered users to store, share, back-up and synchronize their files. OneDrive also works as the storage Frontend and backe ...

and

Dropbox Dropbox is a file hosting service operated by the American company Dropbox, Inc., headquartered in San Francisco, California, that offers cloud storage, file synchronization, personal cloud, and Client (computing), client software. Dropbox w ...

. Unicheck allows users to store documents in their internal library. Global settings allow adjustment of check sensitivity and enable users to choose whether they want to share their checked documents with Unicheck's database. Each newly signed-up user receives 5 trial pages.

Technology

Unicheck uses an

algorithm In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm () is a finite sequence of Rigour#Mathematics, mathematically rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific Computational problem, problems or to perform a computation. Algo ...

that searches for similar text on web pages, in open source repositories, and in the user's internal library. Accuracy of search is achieved by using the algorithm that divides text into small shifting sequences and uses them to look for similarities and by using live web index, which enables checks against all web pages. The technology was developed by computer science engineers and professors. In 2017, the technology was improved by adding

natural language processing Natural language processing (NLP) is a subfield of computer science and especially artificial intelligence. It is primarily concerned with providing computers with the ability to process data encoded in natural language and is thus closely related ...

(NLP) principles. This enabled the system to recognise

synonym A synonym is a word, morpheme, or phrase that means precisely or nearly the same as another word, morpheme, or phrase in a given language. For example, in the English language, the words ''begin'', ''start'', ''commence'', and ''initiate'' are a ...

s and find

paraphrase A paraphrase () or rephrase is the rendering of the same text in different words without losing the meaning of the text itself. More often than not, a paraphrased text can convey its meaning better than the original words. In other words, it is a ...

d content in the checked text. The algorithm has been compared to

latent semantic indexing Latent semantic analysis (LSA) is a technique in natural language processing, in particular distributional semantics, of analyzing relationships between a set of documents and the terms they contain by producing a set of concepts related to the d ...

, a method used by Google to determine connections between words and phrases. The technology can recognise citations and references in the text, given they are properly formatted according to any of the academic styles. Currently, the technology recognises APA, MLA,

Chicago Chicago is the List of municipalities in Illinois, most populous city in the U.S. state of Illinois and in the Midwestern United States. With a population of 2,746,388, as of the 2020 United States census, 2020 census, it is the List of Unite ...

, Turabian, and Harvard styles. The speed of checks per page is 4 seconds.

References

{{reflist

External links

Unicheck official website

Unicheck blog
Plagiarism detectors

History

Functionality

Technology

See also

References

External links