Corpora: 4-month Research officer, text processing

[Eric Atwell]

Leeds University: 4-month Visiting Research Fellowship

Customising a copying-identifier for Biomedical Science student reports

We have funds for a 4-month temporary researcher on an applied IT project.
If you know a postgrad or postdoc wanting a 4-month paid practical placement
in a leading research school; OR writing up Thesis and looking for initial
research post; OR academic seeking funded 4-month sabbatical...
please pass this on:

Project Leaders: Eric Atwell (School of Computing), Paul Gent (School of
Biomedical Sciences), Clive Souter (Director of Joint Honours in Science).

Aim of Project:
To develop a system for detecting student copying in laboratory practical
reports, customised to a specific genre/subject, in our case initially
Biomedical Science first-year reports. The project will involve:
- requirements analysis, collating a Test Corpus of student reports;
- survey of available systems and how well these match requirements spec;
- implementation, based as much as possible on existing software;
- testing and evaluation on Test Corpus of Biomedical science student reports;
- writing documentation and user manual for future use and maintenance.

The Project Output will be: a system customised for this specialised detection
task, and documentation of the methodology used to aid and encourage further
development of customisations or other genres. An indirect extra output will
hopefully be increased appreciation (and takeup) by lecturers of further
possibilities opened for computer-based processing of student reports.

We are aware of many available plagiarism detectors (eg turnitin and others
investigated by HEFCE), but Biomedical Science teaching staff believe these
generic systems are generally too sophisticated / complicated for this specific
problem:
"What we need is something which will go through a directory of Word
.doc files, strip or ignore formatting and just pick out areas of
correspondence.  In other words copying rather than plagiarism as we know it.
When you have 200+ practical reports on one exercise it's bound to happen
and at present it is spotted by chance alone. If we can nip it in the bud
at level one we can think about the more esoteric stuff like turnitin later."

The project must be completed before 30 June 2002;
we hope to appoint a Project Officer for 4 months, February-May 2002.
Candidates must be EU citizens, not requiring work permits in UK.

FURTHER DETAILS and APPLICATIONS: contact Eric Atwell, eric at comp.leeds.ac.uk
OR Paul Gent, bmsjpg at bms.leeds.ac.uk OR Clive Souter, d.c.souter at leeds.ac.uk

CLOSING DATE FOR APPLICATIONS: January 27th 2002

--
Eric Atwell, Distributed Multimedia Systems MSc Tutor & SOCRATES Tutor
School of Computing, University of Leeds, LEEDS LS2 9JT
TEL: 0113-2335430  MOBILE: 0775-1039104 FAX: 0113-2335468
WWW: http://www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/eric  EMAIL: eric at comp.leeds.ac.uk