Death of the Novel(ty): Beyond n-Gram Novelty as a Metric for Textual Creativity
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arXiv
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| Autores principales: | , , , |
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| Formato: | Preprint |
| Publicado: |
2025
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| _version_ | 1866912937924362240 |
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| author | Saakyan, Arkadiy Kim, Najoung Muresan, Smaranda Chakrabarty, Tuhin |
| author_facet | Saakyan, Arkadiy Kim, Najoung Muresan, Smaranda Chakrabarty, Tuhin |
| contents | N-gram novelty is widely used to evaluate language models' ability to generate text outside of their training data. More recently, it has also been adopted as a metric for measuring textual creativity. However, theoretical work on creativity suggests that this approach may be inadequate, as it does not account for creativity's dual nature: novelty (how original the text is) and appropriateness (how sensical and pragmatic it is). We investigate the relationship between this notion of creativity and n-gram novelty through 8,618 expert writer annotations of novelty, pragmaticality, and sensicality via close reading of human- and AI-generated text. We find that while n-gram novelty is positively associated with expert writer-judged creativity, approximately 91% of top-quartile n-gram novel expressions are not judged as creative, cautioning against relying on n-gram novelty alone. Furthermore, unlike in human-written text, higher n-gram novelty in open-source LLMs correlates with lower pragmaticality. In an exploratory study with frontier closed-source models, we additionally confirm that they are less likely to produce creative expressions than humans. Using our dataset, we test whether zero-shot, few-shot, and finetuned models are able to identify expressions perceived as novel by experts (a positive aspect of writing) or non-pragmatic (a negative aspect). Overall, frontier LLMs exhibit performance much higher than random but leave room for improvement, especially struggling to identify non-pragmatic expressions. We further find that LLM-as-a-Judge novelty ratings align with expert writer preferences in an out-of-distribution dataset, more so than an n-gram based metric. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_22641 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Death of the Novel(ty): Beyond n-Gram Novelty as a Metric for Textual Creativity Saakyan, Arkadiy Kim, Najoung Muresan, Smaranda Chakrabarty, Tuhin Computation and Language Artificial Intelligence Human-Computer Interaction N-gram novelty is widely used to evaluate language models' ability to generate text outside of their training data. More recently, it has also been adopted as a metric for measuring textual creativity. However, theoretical work on creativity suggests that this approach may be inadequate, as it does not account for creativity's dual nature: novelty (how original the text is) and appropriateness (how sensical and pragmatic it is). We investigate the relationship between this notion of creativity and n-gram novelty through 8,618 expert writer annotations of novelty, pragmaticality, and sensicality via close reading of human- and AI-generated text. We find that while n-gram novelty is positively associated with expert writer-judged creativity, approximately 91% of top-quartile n-gram novel expressions are not judged as creative, cautioning against relying on n-gram novelty alone. Furthermore, unlike in human-written text, higher n-gram novelty in open-source LLMs correlates with lower pragmaticality. In an exploratory study with frontier closed-source models, we additionally confirm that they are less likely to produce creative expressions than humans. Using our dataset, we test whether zero-shot, few-shot, and finetuned models are able to identify expressions perceived as novel by experts (a positive aspect of writing) or non-pragmatic (a negative aspect). Overall, frontier LLMs exhibit performance much higher than random but leave room for improvement, especially struggling to identify non-pragmatic expressions. We further find that LLM-as-a-Judge novelty ratings align with expert writer preferences in an out-of-distribution dataset, more so than an n-gram based metric. |
| title | Death of the Novel(ty): Beyond n-Gram Novelty as a Metric for Textual Creativity |
| topic | Computation and Language Artificial Intelligence Human-Computer Interaction |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.22641 |