Threads of Subtlety: Detecting Machine-Generated Texts Through Discourse Motifs

Zae Myung Kim, Kwang Lee, Preston Zhu, Vipul Raheja, Dongyeop Kang


Abstract
With the advent of large language models (LLM), the line between human-crafted and machine-generated texts has become increasingly blurred. This paper delves into the inquiry of identifying discernible and unique linguistic properties in texts that were written by humans, particularly uncovering the underlying discourse structures of texts beyond their surface structures. Introducing a novel methodology, we leverage hierarchical parse trees and recursive hypergraphs to unveil distinctive discourse patterns in texts produced by both LLMs and humans. Empirical findings demonstrate that, although both LLMs and humans generate distinct discourse patterns influenced by specific domains, human-written texts exhibit more structural variability, reflecting the nuanced nature of human writing in different domains. Notably, incorporating hierarchical discourse features enhances binary classifiers’ overall performance in distinguishing between human-written and machine-generated texts, even on out-of-distribution and paraphrased samples. This underscores the significance of incorporating hierarchical discourse features in the analysis of text patterns. The code and dataset will be available at [TBA].
Anthology ID:
2024.acl-long.298
Volume:
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5449–5474
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.298
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zae Myung Kim, Kwang Lee, Preston Zhu, Vipul Raheja, and Dongyeop Kang. 2024. Threads of Subtlety: Detecting Machine-Generated Texts Through Discourse Motifs. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 5449–5474, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Threads of Subtlety: Detecting Machine-Generated Texts Through Discourse Motifs (Kim et al., ACL 2024)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2024.acl-long.298.pdf