Detection and Measurement of Syntactic Templates in Generated Text

Chantal Shaib, Yanai Elazar, Junyi Jessy Li, Byron C Wallace


Abstract
The diversity of text can be measured beyond word-level features, however existing diversity evaluation focuses primarily on word-level features. Here we propose a method for evaluating diversity over syntactic features to characterize general repetition in models, beyond frequent n-grams. Specifically, we define syntactic templates (e.g., strings comprising parts-of-speech) and show that models tend to produce templated text in downstream tasks at a higher rate than what is found in human-reference textsWe find that most (76%) templates in model-generated text can be found in pre-training data (compared to only 35% of human-authored text), and are not overwritten during fine-tuning or alignment processes such as RLHF. The connection between templates in generated text and the pre-training data allows us to analyze syntactic templates in models where we do not have the pre-training data.We also find that templates as features are able to differentiate between models, tasks, and domains, and are useful for qualitatively evaluating common model constructions.Finally, we demonstrate the use of templates as a useful tool for analyzing style memorization of training data in LLMs.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.368
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6416–6431
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.368
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.emnlp-main.368
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Chantal Shaib, Yanai Elazar, Junyi Jessy Li, and Byron C Wallace. 2024. Detection and Measurement of Syntactic Templates in Generated Text. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 6416–6431, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Detection and Measurement of Syntactic Templates in Generated Text (Shaib et al., EMNLP 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.368.pdf