Enhancing Plagiarism Detection in Marathi with a Weighted Ensemble of TF-IDF and BERT Embeddings for Low-Resource Language Processing

Atharva Mutsaddi, Aditya Prashant Choudhary


Abstract
Plagiarism involves using another person’s work or concepts without proper attribution, presenting them as original creations. With the growing amount of data communicated in regional languages such as Marathi—one of India’s regional languages—it is crucial to design robust plagiarism detection systems tailored for low-resource languages. Language models like Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) have demonstrated exceptional capability in text representation and feature extraction, making them essential tools for semantic analysis and plagiarism detection. However, the application of BERT for low-resource languages remains underexplored, particularly in the context of plagiarism detection. This paper presents a method to enhance the accuracy of plagiarism detection for Marathi texts using BERT sentence embeddings in conjunction with Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) feature representation. By combining TF-IDF with BERT, the system’s performance is significantly improved, which is especially pronounced in languages where BERT models are not extremely robust due to a lack of resources and corpora. This approach effectively captures statistical, semantic, and syntactic aspects of text features through a weighted voting ensemble of machine learning models.
Anthology ID:
2025.loreslm-1.6
Volume:
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Language Models for Low-Resource Languages
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Editors:
Hansi Hettiarachchi, Tharindu Ranasinghe, Paul Rayson, Ruslan Mitkov, Mohamed Gaber, Damith Premasiri, Fiona Anting Tan, Lasitha Uyangodage
Venues:
LoResLM | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
89–100
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.loreslm-1.6/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Atharva Mutsaddi and Aditya Prashant Choudhary. 2025. Enhancing Plagiarism Detection in Marathi with a Weighted Ensemble of TF-IDF and BERT Embeddings for Low-Resource Language Processing. In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Language Models for Low-Resource Languages, pages 89–100, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Enhancing Plagiarism Detection in Marathi with a Weighted Ensemble of TF-IDF and BERT Embeddings for Low-Resource Language Processing (Mutsaddi & Choudhary, LoResLM 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.loreslm-1.6.pdf