Winnowing: Local Algorithms for Document Fingerprinting

Summary: Introduces local document fingerprinting—algorithms guaranteed to detect copies in large corpora. Proves a lower bound for any local approach and presents winnowing, an efficient method within 33% of that bound; validates on Web data and discusses MOSS usage. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 3484
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2003
Pagerank: 0.00012859554
Overall Rank: 978 | 93.30%
DOI: 10.1145/872757.872770

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Saul Schleimer (University of Illinois Chicago)
2. Daniel S. Wilkerson (University of California Berkeley)
3. Alex Aiken (University of California Berkeley)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{schleimer_sigmod03,
        title = {{Winnowing: Local Algorithms for Document Fingerprinting}},
        author = {Schleimer, Saul and Wilkerson, Daniel S. and Aiken, Alex},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '03},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/872757.872770},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/872757.872770},
        year = {2003}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 15 of 15 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
890	Integrating Conflicting Data: The Role of Source Dependence	2009	VLDB	0.00013382697
4,052	Local Similarity Search for Unstructured Text	2016	SIGMOD	6.935988e-05
4,605	Global Detection of Complex Copying Relationships Between Sources	2010	VLDB	6.6103623e-05
4,765	Durable Top-k Search in Document Archives	2010	SIGMOD	6.5186944e-05
5,995	Coordinated Weighted Sampling for Estimating Aggregates Over Multiple Weight Assignments	2009	VLDB	6.0155431e-05
7,237	Sailing the Information Ocean with Awareness of Currents: Discovery and Application of Source Dependence	2009	CIDR	5.6646649e-05
7,676	Allign: Aligning All-Pair Near-Duplicate Passages in Long Texts	2021	SIGMOD	5.5686107e-05
7,699	SOLOMON: Seeking the Truth Via Copying Detection	2010	VLDB	5.5652613e-05
7,745	Near-Duplicate Text Alignment with One Permutation Hashing	2024	SIGMOD	5.5534781e-05
8,522	TxtAlign: Efficient Near-Duplicate Text Alignment Search via Bottom-k Sketches for Plagiarism Detection	2022	SIGMOD	5.4119882e-05
9,861	Text Indexing for Long Patterns: Anchors are All you Need	2023	VLDB	5.2055975e-05
10,024	Near-Duplicate Sequence Search at Scale for Large Language Model Memorization Evaluation	2023	SIGMOD	5.1757914e-05
10,265	LSHAlign: All-Pair Near-Duplicate Text Alignment via LSH	2026	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05
10,554	Near-Duplicate Text Alignment under Weighted Jaccard Similarity	2026	VLDB	5.093636e-05
12,373	Large-Scale Copy Detection	2011	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 1 of 1 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
1,284	Copy Detection Mechanisms for Digital Documents	1995	SIGMOD	0.00011332822

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	7,676	Allign: Aligning All-Pair Near-Duplicate Passages in Long Texts	2021	SIGMOD
2	12,471	Parsimonious Linear Fingerprinting for Time Series	2010	VLDB
3	3,621	Signature files: Design and performance comparison of some signature extraction methods.	1985	SIGMOD
4	3,725	Finding replicated web collections	2000	SIGMOD
5	4,605	Global Detection of Complex Copying Relationships Between Sources	2010	VLDB
6	14,501	Unstructured Data Bases or Very Efficient Text Searching	1983	PODS
7	8,522	TxtAlign: Efficient Near-Duplicate Text Alignment Search via Bottom-k Sketches for Plagiarism Detection	2022	SIGMOD
8	12,373	Large-Scale Copy Detection	2011	SIGMOD
9	1,284	Copy Detection Mechanisms for Digital Documents	1995	SIGMOD
10	4,052	Local Similarity Search for Unstructured Text	2016	SIGMOD