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Application of Information Retrieval Techniques for Source Code Authorship Attribution

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Database Systems for Advanced Applications (DASFAA 2009)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 5463))

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Abstract

Authorship attribution assigns works of contentious authorship to their rightful owners solving cases of theft, plagiarism and authorship disputes in academia and industry. In this paper we investigate the application of information retrieval techniques to attribution of authorship of C source code. In particular, we explore novel methods for converting C code into documents suitable for retrieval systems, experimenting with 1,597 student programming assignments. We investigate several possible program derivations, partition attribution results by original program length to measure effectiveness of modest and lengthy programs separately, and evaluate three different methods for interpreting document rankings as authorship attribution. The best of our methods achieves an average of 76.78% classification accuracy for a one-in-ten classification problem which is competitive against six existing baselines. The techniques that we present can be the basis of practical software to support source code authorship investigations.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science and Information Technology, RMIT University, GPO Box 2476V, Melbourne, 3001, Australia

    Steven Burrows, Alexandra L. Uitdenbogerd & Andrew Turpin

Authors
  1. Steven Burrows
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  2. Alexandra L. Uitdenbogerd
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  3. Andrew Turpin
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, The University of Queensland, QLD 4072, Brisbane, Australia

    Xiaofang Zhou  & Ke Deng  & 

  2. Tokyo Institute of Technology, Graduate School of Information Science and Engineering, 2-12-1 Oh-Okayama Meguro-ku, 152-8552, Tokyo, Japan

    Haruo Yokota

  3. CSIRO, Castray Esplanade, TAS 7000, Hobart, Australia

    Qing Liu

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© 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Burrows, S., Uitdenbogerd, A.L., Turpin, A. (2009). Application of Information Retrieval Techniques for Source Code Authorship Attribution. In: Zhou, X., Yokota, H., Deng, K., Liu, Q. (eds) Database Systems for Advanced Applications. DASFAA 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5463. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-00887-0_61

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-00887-0_61

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-00886-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-00887-0

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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