Written vs generated text: “naturalness” as a textual and psycholinguistic category

Abstract

In the context of the development of text generation technologies, the opposition “naturalness − unnaturalness of text” has been transformed into a new dichotomy: “naturalness – artificiality”. The aim of this article is to investigate the phenomenon of naturalness in this context from two perspectives: analyzing the linguistic characteristics of a natural text against a generated (artificial) text and systematizing introspective perceptions of Russian native speaker informants as to what a “natural” text should be like and how it should differ from a generated text. The material for the study was a parallel corpus of film reviews in Russian, consisting of two subcorpora: reviews written by people and those generated by a large language model based on prompts, which are the beginnings of reviews, from the first subcorpus. The following methods were applied for the comparative analysis of the two subcorpora: computer-assisted text processing for calculating the values of 130 metrics of text linguistic complexity, psycholinguistic experiment, expert text analysis, contrastive analysis. As a result, it was determined that from the point of view of their own linguistic characteristics, “natural” texts differ from generated texts mainly by greater flexibility of syntactic structure, allowing both omission or reduction of structures and redundancy, as well as by slightly greater lexical variability. Naturalness as a psycholinguistic category is related to the informants’ autostereotypical ideas about the cognitive characteristics of people as a species. The analysis of texts erroneously attributed by informants (generated, labelled as natural and vice versa) showed that a number of characteristics of this autostereotype are overestimated by informants, while others, in general, correlate with the linguistic specificity of texts from the subcorpus of written reviews. In conclusion, we formulate definitions of naturalness as a textual and psycholinguistic category.