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A web search for tortured phrases computer science papers suggests that this problem was first widely noticed and discussed in 2021. The reason seems to have be
by tkgally 3y ago
A web search for tortured phrases computer science papers suggests that this problem was first widely noticed and discussed in 2021. The reason seems to have been the use of machine translation from languages like Chinese and, maybe, writing or paraphrasing by GPT-1 or -2 level LLMs.
With the current widely available models, it is much easier to produce fraudulent papers that cannot be caught just by searching for unnatural expressions.
- matrix2596 3y agothat actually makes sense. thanks.
- duskwuff 3y ago> The reason seems to have been the use of machine translation from languages like Chinese No, it's more deliberate than that. Per the original paper [1], the tortured phrases observed in these papers can be reproduced by running text through an online tool called "Spinbot" which processes English text by replacing words with (frequently incorrect) synonyms. Many of the replacements made are difficult to explain any other way -- replacing "ant" with "underground creepy crawly" is clearly not the work of a translator, for instance. [1]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2107.06751.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2107.06751.pdf
- tkgally 3y agoThanks for the clarification!
- a_bonobo 3y agoI used to tutor MSc-level students and they would use this tool all the time for their essays; copy-paste a paragraph from Wikipedia, run through the tool, copy-paste. Just absolute bottom laziness. (The students all got their degrees; welcome to the age of the-student-is-the-customer)