AutoRef: Generating Refinements of Reviews Given Guidelines

Soham Chitnis, Manasi Patwardhan, Ashwin Srinivasan, Tanmay Tulsidas Verlekar, Lovekesh Vig, Gautam Shroff


Abstract
When examining reviews of research papers, we can distinguish between two hypothetical referees: the maximally lenient referee who accepts any paper with a vacuous review and the maximally strict one who rejects any paper with an overly pedantic review. Clearly, both are of no practical value. Our interest is in a referee who makes a balanced judgement and provides a review abiding by the guidelines. In this paper, we present a case study of automatic correction of an existing machine-generated or human review. The \tt{AutoRef}\ system implements an iterative approach that progressively “refines” a review by attempting to make it more compliant with pre-defined requirements of a “good” review. It implements the following steps: (1) Translate the review requirements into a specification in natural language, of “yes/no” questions; (2) Given a (paper,review) pair, extract answers to the questions; (3) Use the results in (2) to generate a new review; and (4) Return to Step (2) with the paper and the new review. Here, (2) and (3) are implemented by large language model (LLM) based agents. We present a case study using papers and reviews made available for the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR). Our initial empirical results suggest that \tt{AutoRef}\ progressively improves the compliance of the generated reviews to the specification. Currently designed specification makes \tt{AutoRef}\ progressively generate reviews which are stricter, making the decisions more inclined towards “rejections”. This demonstrates the applicability of $AutoRef $ for: (1) The progressive correction of overly lenient reviews, being useful for referees and meta-reviewers; and (2) The generation of progressively stricter reviews for a paper, starting from a vacuous review (“Great paper. Accept.”), facilitating authors when trying to assess weaknesses in their papers.
Anthology ID:
2024.sdp-1.17
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Scholarly Document Processing (SDP 2024)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Tirthankar Ghosal, Amanpreet Singh, Anita Waard, Philipp Mayr, Aakanksha Naik, Orion Weller, Yoonjoo Lee, Shannon Shen, Yanxia Qin
Venues:
sdp | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
175–190
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.sdp-1.17
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Soham Chitnis, Manasi Patwardhan, Ashwin Srinivasan, Tanmay Tulsidas Verlekar, Lovekesh Vig, and Gautam Shroff. 2024. AutoRef: Generating Refinements of Reviews Given Guidelines. In Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Scholarly Document Processing (SDP 2024), pages 175–190, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
AutoRef: Generating Refinements of Reviews Given Guidelines (Chitnis et al., sdp-WS 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.sdp-1.17.pdf