More Aligned, Less Diverse? Analyzing the Grammar and Lexicon of Two Generations of LLMs

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Gude, Adrián, Santos-Ríos, Roi, Bond, Francis, Flickinger, Dan, Gómez-Rodríguez, Carlos, Zamaraeva, Olga
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866910197884125184
author Gude, Adrián
Santos-Ríos, Roi
Bond, Francis
Flickinger, Dan
Gómez-Rodríguez, Carlos
Zamaraeva, Olga
author_facet Gude, Adrián
Santos-Ríos, Roi
Bond, Francis
Flickinger, Dan
Gómez-Rodríguez, Carlos
Zamaraeva, Olga
contents This study contributes to a growing line of research in comparing LLM-generated texts with human-authored text, in this case, English news text. We focus in particular on the evaluation of syntactic properties through formal grammar frameworks. Our analysis compares two generations of LLMs in the context of two human-authored English news datasets from two different years. Employing the Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) formalism, we investigate the distributions of syntactic structures and lexical types of AI-generated texts and contrast them with the corresponding distributions in the human-authored New York Times (NYT) articles. We use diversity metrics from ecology and information theory to quantify variation in grammatical constructions and lexical types. We show that English news text has changed little in the given time frame, while newer LLMs display reduced syntactic and, especially, lexical diversity compared to older, non-instruction-tuned models. These findings point to future work in studying effects of instruction tuning, which, while enhancing coherence and adherence to prompts, may narrow the expressive range of model output.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_06030
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle More Aligned, Less Diverse? Analyzing the Grammar and Lexicon of Two Generations of LLMs
Gude, Adrián
Santos-Ríos, Roi
Bond, Francis
Flickinger, Dan
Gómez-Rodríguez, Carlos
Zamaraeva, Olga
Computation and Language
This study contributes to a growing line of research in comparing LLM-generated texts with human-authored text, in this case, English news text. We focus in particular on the evaluation of syntactic properties through formal grammar frameworks. Our analysis compares two generations of LLMs in the context of two human-authored English news datasets from two different years. Employing the Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) formalism, we investigate the distributions of syntactic structures and lexical types of AI-generated texts and contrast them with the corresponding distributions in the human-authored New York Times (NYT) articles. We use diversity metrics from ecology and information theory to quantify variation in grammatical constructions and lexical types. We show that English news text has changed little in the given time frame, while newer LLMs display reduced syntactic and, especially, lexical diversity compared to older, non-instruction-tuned models. These findings point to future work in studying effects of instruction tuning, which, while enhancing coherence and adherence to prompts, may narrow the expressive range of model output.
title More Aligned, Less Diverse? Analyzing the Grammar and Lexicon of Two Generations of LLMs
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06030