Parliament standards: submitting plagiarised documents

Yesterday the Chilean Chamber of Deputies and the Faculty of Physical Sciences and Mathematics of the University of Chile has signed a collaboration agreement to avoid plagiarism in documents.

This comes as no surprise since between 2014 and 2016, there were at least 40 deputies who paid for reports which were plagiarized by either showing verbatim copies taken from the Internet or without citing sources. The Congress therefore resorted to use an anti-plagiarism tool created by the University of Chile known as DOCODE. The software program has been created by the Web Intelligence Center of the Department of Industrial Civil Engineering of the University of Chile (WIC). The software “allows the detection of plagiarism based on technologies of text mining and natural language processing. The tool analyzes the documents that users upload and compares them with all documents indexed on the web and / or a repository of documents created by them. Then, it gives as a result a report of plagiarism in which the different sources of extraction of the document can be reviewed, being able to visit them for their reading.” According to the publication, the Chilean Chamber of Deputies would be “the only legislative body in Latin America ‘that applies a model of this type’”.

The Speaker of the House, noted that the collaboration agreements “is of enormous importance to raise Parliament's standards in terms of submitting documents such as bills, external consultancies, commission reports, etc.”. The parliamentarian also stressed that the use of this tool will place the Chamber of Deputies as the only legislative body in Latin America "that applies a model of this type, where all the works will be part of a comprehensive review process."