Feedback is New Scientist's popular sideways look at the latest science and technology news. You can submit items you believe may amuse readers to Feedback by emailing feedback@newscientist.com Science is one of the most fruitful sources of new terminology. There's nothing like a surfeit of terms like "mitochondrial synthesis" and "quantum fluctuations" to make your writing sound authoritative Recently there has been a spate of scientific papers containing the phrase "vegetative electron microscopy/microscope". The term suggests a device for scanning broccoli, but it is utter nonsense. There are scanning electron microscopes and tunnelling electron microscopes, but not vegetative electron microscopes.

This paper presents various automatic detection methods to extract so called tortured phrases from scientific papers. These tortured phrases, e.g. flag to clamor instead of signal to noise, are the results of paraphrasing tools used to escape plagiarism detection. We built a dataset and evaluated several strategies to flag previously undocumented tortured phrases. The proposed and tested methods are based on language models and either on embeddings similarities or on predictions of masked token. We found that an approach using token prediction and that propagates the scores to the chunk level gives the best results. With a recall value of .87 and a precision value of .61, it could retrieve new tortured phrases to be submitted to domain experts for validation.

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.

The world of AI research is in shambles. From the academics prioritizing easy-to-monetize schemes over breaking novel ground, to the Silicon Valley elite using the threat of job loss to encourage corporate-friendly hypotheses, the system is a broken mess. And Google deserves a lion's share of the blame. There were approximately 85,000 research papers published globally on the subject of AI/ML in the year 2000. Fast-forward to 2021 and there were nearly twice as many published in the US alone. Our speakers and sessions give "must-watch" a whole new meaning!

The group, led by Guillaume Cabanac at the University of Toulouse in France, could not understand why researchers would use the terms'counterfeit consciousness', 'profound neural organization' and'colossal information' in place of the more widely recognized terms'artificial intelligence', 'deep neural network' and'big data'. Further investigation revealed that these strange terms -- which they dub "tortured phrases" -- are probably the result of automated translation or software that attempts to disguise plagiarism. And they seem to be rife in computer-science papers. Research-integrity sleuths say that Cabanac and his colleagues have uncovered a new type of fabricated research paper, and that their work, posted in a preprint on arXiv on 12 July1, might expose only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the literature affected. To get a sense of how many papers are affected, the researchers ran a search for 30 tortured phrases in journal articles indexed in the citation database Dimensions.