DependencyAI: Detecting AI Generated Text through Dependency Parsing
Organizations: Sketch Recognition Lab, Texas A&M University
Abstract
As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly prevalent, reliable methods for detecting AI-generated text are critical for mitigating potential risks. We introduce DependencyAI, a simple and interpretable approach for detecting AI-generated text using only the labels of linguistic dependency relations. Our method achieves competitive performance across monolingual, multi-generator, and multilingual settings. To increase interpretability, we analyze feature importance to reveal syntactic structures that distinguish AI-generated from human-written text. We also observe a systematic overprediction of certain models on unseen domains, suggesting that generator-specific writing styles may affect cross-domain generalization. Overall, our results demonstrate that dependency relations alone provide a robust signal for AI-generated text detection, establishing DependencyAI as a strong linguistically grounded, interpretable, and non-neural network baseline.
Figures & tables
| Detector | Test | Prec | Recall | F1 | Acc |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| RoBERTa | All | 96.96 | 97.01 | 96.94 | 97.00 |
| arXiv | 55.72 | 36.55 | 32.29 | 36.55 | |
| PeerRead | 70.58 | 70.12 | 66.89 | 69.47 | |
| 77.21 | 74.49 | 71.66 | 74.49 | ||
| WikiHow | 72.62 | 70.56 | 68.85 | 68.36 | |
| Wikipedia | 46.37 | 52.22 | 39.37 | 51.91 |
| Detector | Test | Prec | Recall | F1 | Acc |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| XLM-R | All | 86.64 | 99.49 | 92.62 | 91.80 |
| Chinese | 92.71 | 99.66 | 96.06 | 95.93 | |
| English | 88.72 | 99.36 | 93.74 | 93.09 | |
| German | 78.85 | 99.57 | 88.01 | 86.43 | |
| Italian | 98.86 | 1.00 | 99.43 | 99.42 | |
| Russian | 96.06 | 97.50 | 96.77 | 96.75 |
AI-Generated Text Detection
AI-generated text detection develops methods to distinguish human-written, machine-generated, and AI-edited text.
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