Not X, but When: Diagnosing a Mandarin LLM Writing Tic through Contextual Appropriateness
Drawing on Gricean pragmatics and corrective negation, we introduce a decision tree that classifies uses as substantive, optional, or defective by testing whether the context makes X a live alternative and whether rejecting X is informative.
ProofPaper ↗
Key points
- Recurring expressions in model-written text are often treated as signatures of machine authorship, yet most of them serve legitimate functions.
- Whether such an expression is a tic depends on whether the model knows when it is called for.
- This judgment of appropriateness, central to communicative competence, remains largely unexamined for language models.
- We study it through the Mandarin corrective construction bushi X, ershi Y ("not X, but Y").
Sources (1)
- [1]Not X, but When: Diagnosing a Mandarin LLM Writing Tic through Contextual AppropriatenessarXiv (AI, ML, NLP, CV, robotics, multi-agent) · Oct 15, 05:22 PM
Drawing on Gricean pragmatics and corrective negation, we introduce a decision tree that classifies uses as substantive, optional, or defective by testing whether the context makes X a live alternative and whether rejecting X is informative.
Recurring expressions in model-written text are often treated as signatures of machine authorship, yet most of them serve legitimate functions.
Extractive summary: sentences quoted from the sources.
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