The meteoric rise in text generation capability has been accompanied by parallel growth in interest in machine-generated text detection: the capability to identify whether a given text was generated using a model or written by a person. While detection models show strong performance, they have the capacity to cause significant negative impacts. We explore potential biases in English machine-generated text detection systems. We curate a dataset of student essays and assess 16 different detection systems for bias across four attributes: gender, race/ethnicity, English-language learner (ELL) status, and economic status. We evaluate these attributes using regression-based models to determine the significance and power of the effects, as well as performing subgroup analysis. We find that while biases are generally inconsistent across systems, there are several key issues: several models tend to classify disadvantaged groups as machine-generated, ELL essays are more likely to be classified as machine-generated, economically disadvantaged students’ essays are less likely to be classified as machine-generated, and non-White ELL essays are disproportionately classified as machine-generated relative to their White counterparts. Finally, we perform human annotation and find that while humans perform generally poorly at the detection task, they show no significant biases on the studied attributes.

While the web provides a fantastic linguistic resource, collecting and processing data at web-scale is beyond the reach of most academic laboratories. Previous research has relied on search engines to collect online information, but this is hopelessly inefficient for building large-scale linguistic resources, such as lists of named-entity types or clusters of distributionally similar words. An alternative to processing web-scale text directly is to use the information provided in an N-gram corpus. An N-gram corpus is an efficient compression of large amounts of text. An N-gram corpus states how often each sequence of words (up to length N) occurs. We propose tools for working with enhanced web-scale N-gram corpora that include richer levels of source annotation, such as part-of-speech tags. We describe a new set of search tools that make use of these tags, and collectively lower the barrier for lexical learning and ambiguity resolution at web-scale. They will allow novel sources of information to be applied to long-standing natural language challenges.