arXiv Computation and Language

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.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 14

When Context Misleads: Surprisal, Energy and Attention Entropy as Metrics of Coherence Illusions in LLMs

The study examines whether Dutch language models exhibit coherence‑illusion effects similar to human readers, using texts that refer back to earlier context with words like ‘again’ and ‘too’. Surprisal at the critical word aligns with human acceptability and eye‑tracking data, showing that models are more surprised by incoherent continuations unless a matching distractor is present. Attention entropy and an energy metric from associative‑memory literature reveal heads that behave differently under coherence versus incoherence, and ablating these heads demonstrates transfer effects across experiments, indicating a shared underlying mechanism.

By Ece Takmaz, Nitin Kumar, Li Kloostra, Jakub Dotlacil
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 31

Diverging Transformer Predictions for Human Sentence Processing: A Comprehensive Analysis of Agreement Attraction Effects

The study evaluates eleven autoregressive transformer models on English agreement attraction scenarios using a surprisal-based approach. Results show that while transformers match human reading times for prepositional phrase configurations, they perform poorly on object‑extracted relative clauses, with predictions diverging across models and failing to capture human interference patterns. The authors argue that current transformers cannot adequately model human morphosyntactic processing and call for more rigorous, comprehensive testing to avoid misleading conclusions from limited syntactic setups.

By Titus von der Malsburg, Sebastian Pad\'o
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 17

Modelling Adjectival Modification Effects on Semantic Plausibility

The paper investigates how adjectival modifiers affect the semantic plausibility of events, using the Adept benchmark of 16,000 English sentence pairs that differ by a single adjective. Experiments show that sentence transformers, despite being conceptually suited to the task, underperform compared to models like RoBERTa. The authors provide an error analysis and discuss the implications of their findings for future work on balancing training and test data.

By Anna Golub, Beate Zywietz, Annerose Eichel
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 19

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.

By Chantal Shaib, Tuhin Chakrabarty, Diego Garcia-Olano, Byron C. Wallace
arXiv AI
Sep 1

Using Prosody to Predict Syntactic Structure

arXiv:2608.30260v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While it is well-established that prosody carries crucial cues for syntactic structure, the degree and nature of correspondence between these two dom...

By Junghyun Min, Alex Warstadt, Tamar I. Regev, Tiago Pimentel, Ethan Gotlieb Wilcox
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 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