arXiv Computation and Language

Measuring AI "Slop" in Text

The paper introduces a taxonomy for the term "AI slop," a label for low‑quality AI‑generated text, and proposes interpretable dimensions to assess it. Using expert interviews and span‑level annotation, the authors find that binary slop judgments are somewhat subjective yet correlate with latent factors like coherence and relevance. Their framework can be applied to both detection and preference tasks, offering insights into linguistic and stylistic contributors to quality, while noting that fully automated, scalable methods remain an open challenge.

arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 24

Granuscore: A Reference-Free Measure of Granularity for Text Analysis and Question Answering

Granuscore is a reference‑free metric that measures the granularity of text by exploiting the structure of a hierarchical embedding space. It successfully reproduces known hierarchical orderings on the Granola‑EQ dataset, distinguishes granularity across different discourse contexts, and explains sentence‑specificity variations beyond sentence length. The authors also apply Granuscore to four question‑answering benchmarks, revealing systematic differences in granularity among questions, gold answers, and model outputs, thereby offering a new lens for assessing QA dataset difficulty.

By Lukas Ellinger, Alexander Fichtl, Miriam Ansch\"utz, Georg Groh
arXiv Computation and Language
3d ago

A Systematic Analysis of Linguistic Features in AI-Generated English Text Detection Across Domains and Models

The paper presents a large‑scale empirical study of 284 interpretable linguistic features to detect AI‑generated English text across 30 language models and 10 text domains. It finds that classifiers using only linguistic features can reliably distinguish machine‑from human‑written text, but most indicators are highly context‑dependent. Only lexical richness measures consistently generalize across model families and domains, offering robust signals for detection.

By Yassir El Attar, Esra D\"onmez, Maximilian Maurer, Agnieszka Falenska
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 24

Reference-Based Analysis of Coherence and Diversity in Open-Ended Text Generation

The paper introduces a reference-based framework to analyze coherence and diversity in open-ended text generation. It evaluates these properties by aligning them with human trajectories, comparing them to human continuations, and estimating their likelihood under a human reference distribution. Experiments show that diversity alignment and mean-based comparisons correlate with human quality ratings, while reference likelihood also associates positively, though results vary by configuration.

By Esteban Garc\'es Arias
arXiv AI
Aug 26

The Limits of Automatic Evaluation of Creativity in Large Language Models

The paper examines whether existing automatic methods can reliably assess creativity in text produced by large language models (LLMs). By collecting human ratings on 11 creativity dimensions for both human and AI short stories, the authors compare these judgments with automated metrics and LLM-as-a-Judge evaluations. The results show a significant misalignment: automated metrics and LLM judges favor AI-generated stories and show near-zero correlation with human assessments, revealing fundamental limitations in current computational approaches to evaluating creative text.

By Alessandro Tutone, Giorgio Franceschelli, Mirco Musolesi
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 22

Why is AI-generated language so hard to understand?

The paper investigates why AI-generated text has become harder to understand, focusing on psycholinguistic features linked to human processing difficulty such as object relative clauses, long syntactic dependencies, and low-frequency n-grams. Using a new corpus of AI-generated text from diverse domains, the study finds that frontier and near-frontier language models employ these difficult features more frequently than paraphrases from round-trip translation and human writing, including more inanimate subjects with animate verbs, longer dependencies, stacked nouns, and reduced object relatives. The authors hypothesize that AI models prioritize information density for tasks like math, code, and reasoning, diverging from human communication goals, and demonstrate this by fine‑tuning a model with a length penalty, which reduces human‑like linguistic behavior.

By Thomas Hikaru Clark, Matias B. Martin, Kyle Mahowald
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 11

Does Linguistic Structure Enrichment Enhance Coherence Assessment? Not With Current Architectures

The paper examines whether adding syntactic and rhetorical structure to text can improve the prediction of incoherence in large language model outputs. Experiments show that plain text actually yields higher accuracy, as the added structural information conflicts with the models’ architectures. The authors also demonstrate that coherence assessment can help detect misleading content by applying zero‑shot experiments to a Brazilian disinformation dataset.

By Victor Mazzotti, Luiz Pereira, Marina Bitencourt dos Santos, Helena Maia, Carlos Caetano, N\'adia Felix, Sandra Avila