Emphasizing the Commendable: A Study of Homogenized Transitive Verb Constructions in Machine Generated Peer Reviews

Abstract

We present a study of machine generated text (MGT) output homogenization with a focus on the relative usage of the prototypical object construction of verbs (the O construction), which takes a noun phrase as its accusative argument. Verbs of different semantics have different tendencies of selecting a direct object or clausal complement; and hence lead to natural variation away from the prototypical usage. However, our results in the study between scientific peer reviews written by human and machines show a shift to unusually high usage of the O construction in MGT and greatly suppressing the frequency of other construction types. This is considered a serious case of syntactic homogenization. A major finding is that frequent verbs, like "emphasize", appear top on the list of such homogenized syntactic construction. This is more striking than identifying disproportionately more frequent usage of naturally rare words such as "commendable" in previous work. Our results will contribute to the prevention of further homogenization of MGT before they merge deeper into the ecosystem of human-written text.

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