Automated Focused Feedback Generation for Scientific Writing Assistance

Eric Chamoun, Michael Schlichtkrull, Andreas Vlachos


Abstract
Scientific writing is a challenging task, particularly for novice researchers who often rely on feedback from experienced peers. Recent work has primarily focused on improving surface form and style rather than manuscript content. In this paper, we propose a novel task: automated focused feedback generation for scientific writing assistance. We present SWIF2T: a Scientific WrIting Focused Feedback Tool. It is designed to generate specific, actionable and coherent comments, which identify weaknesses in a scientific paper and/or propose revisions to it. Our approach consists of four components - planner, investigator, reviewer and controller - leveraging multiple Large Language Models (LLMs) to implement them. We compile a dataset of 300 peer reviews citing weaknesses in scientific papers and conduct human evaluation. The results demonstrate the superiority in specificity, reading comprehension, and overall helpfulness of SWIF2T’s feedback compared to other approaches. In our analysis, we also identified cases where automatically generated reviews were judged better than human ones, suggesting opportunities for integration of AI-generated feedback in scientific writing.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-acl.580
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
9742–9763
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.580
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.findings-acl.580
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Eric Chamoun, Michael Schlichtkrull, and Andreas Vlachos. 2024. Automated Focused Feedback Generation for Scientific Writing Assistance. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024, pages 9742–9763, Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Automated Focused Feedback Generation for Scientific Writing Assistance (Chamoun et al., Findings 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.580.pdf