A Corpus-Based Analysis of Lexical Bundles in AI-Generated and Human-Written Academic Essays

Abstract

The adoption of Generative AI in academic writing has blurred the distinction between AI-generated and human-generated text, leaving the question of how to distinguish the two.With Generative AI now integrated into academic writing, the question is now how to tell the difference between content generated by AI and that written by humans. Although there have been various studies of recurrent multi-word sequences so far, they have not been studied as extensively as they are in the field of academic discourse, especially in terms of how they organise, interpret and rhetorically shape academic discourse. In this study, the focus has been on identifying the lexical bundles in the computer-generated and in the human-written academic writing and comparing the two by a corpus-based approach. It is based on the theory of lexical bundles which is based on frequency, proposed by Biber and his colleagues, and the structural and functional taxonomy and classification by Biber and others. The analysis focuses on three aspects: frequency and distribution, structural configuration and discourse function. This research explores how much each style of writing relies on the same bundles of noun phrases, prepositional phrases, verb phrases, and clauses and whether there are any preferences for those bundles with each style of writing. The approach is focussed on function, such as sets of functions related to research-oriented/reference functions, text organisation and stance. The study adds to the existing studies of AI-assisted academic writing, which have focused on analysing individual words and grammar at the sentence level, by focusing on the patterns of recurrence of phrases. The results will inform about the formulaic quality of AI created academic writing and its association with traditional academic writing by humans. The study also offers implications for academic writing, corpus-informed pedagogy, as well as critical use of Generative AI in higher education.

This paper delves into the implications of lexical bundles in academic writing and their association with AI tools such as ChatGPT.We will explore the importance of lexical bundles in academic writing and the correlation between lexical bundles and artificial intelligence (AI) tools like ChatGPT in this paper.

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22110912