Soon, plagiarism software to check theses in Punjabi

Ravneet Singh

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Tribune News Service

Patiala, September 11

Two associate professors of Punjabi University and DAV College, Jalandhar, have prepared a plagiarism software to check theses written in Punjabi. They will soon be able to offer the Punjabi version to universities, including Panjab University.

Dr Vishal Goyal, associate professor at the Department of Computer Science, Punjabi University, and Dr Rajeev Puri, assistant professor at DAV College, Jalandhar, have received approval from the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MEITY) to carry out the pilot project. Last year, they had received a grant of Rs 20 lakh from the MEITY to build the initial phase of the software for Punjabi and Hindi texts.

The two later joined by Jitesh Pubreja, a programmer, and Jaswinder Singh, a language expert, recently held a meeting with the MEITY, which allowed them to launch a pilot project. The software includes all sources, including previously written theses, books and manuscripts of a particular language.

"This is the first Indian-made software which will have its own repository of theses projects available from various sources. URKUND, an anti-plagiarism software adopted by the UGC, is not Indian made and does not have a reservoir to match the text with. It functions with help of files available in the internet," Dr Rajeev Puri said.

He said, "We have made our own repository of 350 projects. The first part related to Punjabi language theses has been prepared with the help of a repository available on Shodhganga, an online reservoir of Indian languages. We also visited the Punjabi Sahitya Academy, clicked photographs of theses projects and stored the text in word files thereafter." The team will soon add tools for Hindi texts to the software, he added.