SAGE (Subjectivity-Aware Generation Estimator): A Linguistic Framework for AI-Generated Review Detection *

Abstract

We propose a simple, linguistically motivated approach to detecting AI-generated peer reviews based on the inherently human trait of subjectivity. We capture subjectivity at two levels: the semantic level of evaluative language and modality and the pragmatic level of speech acts. Using features derived from speech act annotations and model-predicted subjectivity scores, we train a lightweight classifier that achieves an AUROC of 0.9566 with only these linguistic features. Combining its output with the state-of-the-art detector Sem-Detect raises the TPR at 1% FPR of Sem-Detect on the APRDB benchmark from 0.874 to 0.985, outperforming the current state of the art. Our results show that linguistic features of subjectivity provide an explainable source of information for detecting AI-generated peer reviews and can be readily integrated into existing detection methods. The code and models are publicly available on GitHub (https://github.com/Arys02/generated\_ text\_detection\_hub) and Hugging Face (https://huggingface.co/Arys02), respectively.