# Investigating the detection of Tortured Phrases in Scientific Literature

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.13024 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13024/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 16 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Oct 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01108/) (2019)
- [Longformer: The Long-Document Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05150/) (2020)
- [ALBERT: A Lite BERT for Self-supervised Learning of Language Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11942/) (2019)
- [Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science. Evidence of critical issues affecting established journals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06751/) (2021)
- [Identifying Machine-Paraphrased Plagiarism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11909/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Detection of tortured phrases in scientific literature](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03370/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

With the help of online tools, unscrupulous authors can today generate a pseudo-scientific article and attempt to publish it. Some of these tools work by replacing or paraphrasing existing texts to produce new content, but they have a tendency to generate nonsensical expressions. A recent study introduced the concept of 'tortured phrase', an unexpected odd phrase that appears instead of the fixed expression. E.g. counterfeit consciousness instead of artificial intelligence. The present study aims at investigating how tortured phrases, that are not yet listed, can be detected automatically. We conducted several experiments, including non-neural binary classification, neural binary classification and cosine similarity comparison of the phrase tokens, yielding noticeable results.