FTLM: A Fuzzy TOPSIS Language Modeling Approach for Plagiarism Severity Assessment

Detecting plagiarism poses a significant challenge for academic institutions, research centers, and content-centric organizations, especially in cases involving subtle paraphrasing and content manipulation where conventional methods often prove inadequate. Our paper proposes FTLM (Fuzzy TOPSIS Language Modeling), a novel method for detecting plagiarism within decision science. FTLM integrates language models with fuzzy sorting techniques to assess plagiarism severity by evaluating the similarity of potential solutions to a reference. The method involves two stages: leveraging language modeling to define criteria and alternatives and implementing enhanced fuzzy TOPSIS. Word usage patterns, grammatical structures, and semantic coherence represent fuzzy membership functions. Moreover, pre-trained language models enhance semantic similarity analysis. This approach highlights the benefits of combining fuzzy logic's tolerance for imprecision with the semantic evaluation capabilities of advanced language models, thereby offering a comprehensive and contextually aware method for analyzing plagiarism severity. The experimental results on the benchmark dataset demonstrate effective features that enhance performance on the user-defined severity ranking order.