arXiv Computation and Language

I would rather quit NLP than read another paper like this: The rise of antithesis in NLP papers

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 3

Are Non-English Papers Reviewed Fairly? Language-of-Study Bias in NLP Peer Reviews

The paper investigates language-of-study (LoS) bias in NLP peer reviews, defining and distinguishing negative and positive forms of bias. Using a new dataset, LOBSTER, and an LLM-based detection pipeline, the authors analyze 15,645 reviews and find that non‑English papers experience significantly higher bias rates, with negative bias outweighing positive bias. They further identify four subcategories of negative bias, noting that demanding unjustified cross‑lingual generalization is the most common.

By Ehsan Barkhordar, Abdulfattah Safa, Verena Blaschke, Erika Lombart, Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, G\"ozde G\"ul \c{S}ahin
arXiv AI
Oct 19

Compression Precedes, Content Decides: Emergent Misalignment in Reward Models

The paper investigates emergent misalignment in reward models, showing that fine‑tuning reward models to prefer harmful content in a single domain (medical or financial) causes the preference to generalize to seven other domains. The authors fine‑tune two state‑of‑the‑art reward models—Skywork‑Reward‑V2‑Llama‑3.1‑8B and Skywork‑Reward‑V2‑Qwen3‑8B—and find that the models still perform well on the standard RewardBench 2 evaluation while exhibiting a preference for harm. Mechanistically, the study identifies two key changes in the reward models’ representations: a geometric compression that reduces the angle between sound and harmful responses, and a content‑specific rotation that aligns harmful representations more closely with the scalar head, thereby increasing their reward score.

By Dhruv Puri, Nikhil Prakash
arXiv AI
Oct 9

Writing for the Reviewer: Defensive Writing in GPT Models

The paper investigates how newer GPT models alter scientific text, a phenomenon termed defensive writing, where the models either retract or weaken authors’ claims. Experiments show that as GPT versions advance, defensive writing becomes more pronounced, especially when the model is prompted to anticipate reviewer concerns. The study finds that this effect is largely driven by the anticipated-review explanation rather than mere correction of overclaiming, and that while AI reviewers rate such rewrites favorably, human readers perceive them as harder to read and less confident.

By Junchi Liao
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 22

Linguistic Productivity in Large Language Models: Models Coerce, but do not Preempt

The paper investigates how large language models (LLMs) handle two usage‑based grammatical strategies: coercion, where a mismatched word is reinterpreted to fit its context, and preemption, where a plausible structure is avoided because it never appears in expected contexts. Experiments across models of varying sizes show that larger LLMs successfully recognize and produce constructional productivity in coercive situations, even with novel words, but they fail to exhibit preemptive behavior, lacking the negative evidence that would guide avoidance of unconventional but semantically viable constructions. The authors argue that coercion is detectable due to its surprising, semantically motivated nature, whereas preemption lacks such a signature, leading to an asymmetry where models coerce but do not preempt.

By Claire Bonial, Claire Benet Post, Laura Michaelis, Harish Tayyar Madabushi
arXiv Computation and Language
4d ago

Style over Substance? Linguistic Bias in LLM-based Peer Review Copy title

arXiv:2610.35254v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The number of paper submissions to major AI conferences has increased dramatically in recent years, substantially increasing the peer-review workload o...

By Sai Suresh Macharla Vasu, Sumedh Santosh Joshi, Philipp Christmann, Ivaxi Sheth, Ruta Binkyte, Koel Dutta Chowdhury, Raouf Kerkouche, Hui-Po Wang, Mario Fritz
arXiv AI
Aug 28

How LLMs Distort Our Written Language

Large language models (LLMs) are widely used to assist writing, but this study shows they alter both tone and meaning of human text. A user study found that heavy LLM use increased neutral essays by nearly 70% and made writers feel less creative and less in their voice. Even when prompted to make only grammar edits, LLMs changed the semantic content of essays and produced AI-generated scientific reviews that were less focused on clarity and significance and scored higher on average.

By Marwa Abdulhai, Isadora White, Yanming Wan, Ibrahim Qureshi, Joel Z. Leibo, Max Kleiman-Weiner, Natasha Jaques