Is writing style predictive of scientific fraud?

Chloé Braud (1) , Anders Søgaard (1)

1 UCPH - University of Copenhagen = Københavns Universitet

The problem of detecting scientific fraud using machine learning was recently introduced , with initial, positive results from a model taking into account various general indicators. The results seem to suggest that writing style is predictive of scientific fraud. We revisit these initial experiments , and show that the leave-one-out testing procedure they used likely leads to a slight overestimate of the predictability, but also that simple models can outper-form their proposed model by some margin. We go on to explore more abstract linguistic features, such as linguistic complexity and discourse structure, only to obtain negative results. Upon analyzing our models, we do see some interesting patterns , though: Scientific fraud, for examples , contains less comparison, as well as different types of hedging and ways of presenting logical reasoning.

Domaines: Informatique et langage [cs.CL]

Chloé Braud, Anders Søgaard. Is writing style predictive of scientific fraud?. Proceedings of the Workshop on Stylistic Variation, Sep 2017, Copenhagen, France. pp.37-42, ⟨10.18653/v1/W17-4905⟩. ⟨hal-02373823⟩