Do LLMs write like humans? Variation in grammatical and rhetorical styles

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Reinhart, Alex, Markey, Ben, Laudenbach, Michael, Pantusen, Kachatad, Yurko, Ronald, Weinberg, Gordon, Brown, David West
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Reinhart, Alex
Markey, Ben
Laudenbach, Michael
Pantusen, Kachatad
Yurko, Ronald
Weinberg, Gordon
Brown, David West
author_facet Reinhart, Alex
Markey, Ben
Laudenbach, Michael
Pantusen, Kachatad
Yurko, Ronald
Weinberg, Gordon
Brown, David West
contents Large language models (LLMs) are capable of writing grammatical text that follows instructions, answers questions, and solves problems. As they have advanced, it has become difficult to distinguish their output from human-written text. While past research has found some differences in surface features such as word choice and punctuation, and developed classifiers to detect LLM output, none has studied the rhetorical styles of LLMs. Using several variants of Llama 3 and GPT-4o, we construct two parallel corpora of human- and LLM-written texts from common prompts. Using Douglas Biber's set of lexical, grammatical, and rhetorical features, we identify systematic differences between LLMs and humans and between different LLMs. These differences persist when moving from smaller models to larger ones, and are larger for instruction-tuned models than base models. This observation of differences demonstrates that despite their advanced abilities, LLMs struggle to match human stylistic variation. Attention to more advanced linguistic features can hence detect patterns in their behavior not previously recognized.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_16107
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Do LLMs write like humans? Variation in grammatical and rhetorical styles
Reinhart, Alex
Markey, Ben
Laudenbach, Michael
Pantusen, Kachatad
Yurko, Ronald
Weinberg, Gordon
Brown, David West
Computation and Language
Large language models (LLMs) are capable of writing grammatical text that follows instructions, answers questions, and solves problems. As they have advanced, it has become difficult to distinguish their output from human-written text. While past research has found some differences in surface features such as word choice and punctuation, and developed classifiers to detect LLM output, none has studied the rhetorical styles of LLMs. Using several variants of Llama 3 and GPT-4o, we construct two parallel corpora of human- and LLM-written texts from common prompts. Using Douglas Biber's set of lexical, grammatical, and rhetorical features, we identify systematic differences between LLMs and humans and between different LLMs. These differences persist when moving from smaller models to larger ones, and are larger for instruction-tuned models than base models. This observation of differences demonstrates that despite their advanced abilities, LLMs struggle to match human stylistic variation. Attention to more advanced linguistic features can hence detect patterns in their behavior not previously recognized.
title Do LLMs write like humans? Variation in grammatical and rhetorical styles
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.16107