SynSciPass: detecting appropriate uses of scientific text generation

Domenic Rosati


Abstract
Approaches to machine generated text detection tend to focus on binary classification of human versus machine written text. In the scientific domain where publishers might use these models to examine manuscripts under submission, misclassification has the potential to cause harm to authors. Additionally, authors may appropriately use text generation models such as with the use of assistive technologies like translation tools. In this setting, a binary classification scheme might be used to flag appropriate uses of assistive text generation technology as simply machine generated which is a cause of concern. In our work, we simulate this scenario by presenting a state-of-the-art detector trained on the DAGPap22 with machine translated passages from Scielo and find that the model performs at random. Given this finding, we develop a framework for dataset development that provides a nuanced approach to detecting machine generated text by having labels for the type of technology used such as for translation or paraphrase resulting in the construction of SynSciPass. By training the same model that performed well on DAGPap22 on SynSciPass, we show that not only is the model more robust to domain shifts but also is able to uncover the type of technology used for machine generated text. Despite this, we conclude that current datasets are neither comprehensive nor realistic enough to understand how these models would perform in the wild where manuscript submissions can come from many unknown or novel distributions, how they would perform on scientific full-texts rather than small passages, and what might happen when there is a mix of appropriate and inappropriate uses of natural language generation.
Anthology ID:
2022.sdp-1.27
Volume:
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Scholarly Document Processing
Month:
October
Year:
2022
Address:
Gyeongju, Republic of Korea
Editors:
Arman Cohan, Guy Feigenblat, Dayne Freitag, Tirthankar Ghosal, Drahomira Herrmannova, Petr Knoth, Kyle Lo, Philipp Mayr, Michal Shmueli-Scheuer, Anita de Waard, Lucy Lu Wang
Venue:
sdp
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
214–222
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.sdp-1.27
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Domenic Rosati. 2022. SynSciPass: detecting appropriate uses of scientific text generation. In Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Scholarly Document Processing, pages 214–222, Gyeongju, Republic of Korea. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
SynSciPass: detecting appropriate uses of scientific text generation (Rosati, sdp 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.sdp-1.27.pdf
Code
 domenicrosati/synscipass