Towards an understanding and explanation for mixed-initiative artificial scientific text detection

Large language models (LLMs) have gained popularity in various fields for their exceptional capability of generating human-like text. Their potential misuse has raised social concerns about plagiarism in academic contexts. However, effective artificial scientific text detection is a non-trivial task due to several challenges, including (1) the lack of a clear understanding of the differences between machine-generated and human-written scientific text, (2) the poor generalization performance of existing methods caused by out-of-distribution issues, and (3) the limited support for human-machine collaboration with sufficient interpretability during the detection process. In this paper, we first identify the critical distinctions between machine-generated and human-written scientific text through a quantitative experiment. Then, we propose a mixed-initiative workflow that combines human experts’ prior knowledge with machine intelligence, along with a visual analytics system to facilitate efficient and trustworthy scientific text detection. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through two case studies and a controlled user study. We also provide design implications for interactive artificial text detection tools in high-stakes decision-making scenarios.