This is scientific American 60 second science. I'm Christopher Intagiyata.

The English language version of Wikipedia has almost 6 million articles,

and if you're a cheating student that's six million essays

already written for you footnotes and all. Except plagiarism isn't really an effective

tactic. Just plug the text into a search engine and game over. But what about having a ghost writer at a paper mill

compose your final essay? Standard play duration software cannot detect this kind of cheating.

Stephen Luansen is a data analyst at the University of Copenhagen.

In Denmark where he's based, ghostwriting is a growing problem at high schools.

So Luwansen and his colleagues created a program called Ghost Writer that can detect the cheats.

At its core is a neural network, trained and tested on 130,000 real essays from 10,000 Danish

students.

After reading through tens of thousands of essays, labeled as being written by the

same author or not, the machine taught itself to tune in to the characteristics that might tip

off cheating.

For example, did a student's essays share

the same styles of punctuation, the same spelling mistakes?

Were the abbreviations the same?

By scrutinizing inconsistencies like those,

Ghostwriter was able to pinpoint a cheated essay

nearly 90% of the time. The team presented the results at the European

Symposium on Artificial Neural Networks, Computational Intelligence,

and Machine learning.

...