ChatCite: LLM Agent with Human Workflow Guidance for Comparative Literature Summary

Yutong Li, Lu Chen, Aiwei Liu, Kai Yu, Lijie Wen


Abstract
The literature review is an indispensable step in the research process. It provides the benefit of comprehending the research problem and understanding the current research situation while conducting a comparative analysis of prior works. However, literature summary is challenging and time consuming. The previous LLM-based studies on literature review mainly focused on the complete process, including literature retrieval, screening, and summarization. However, for the summarization step, simple CoT method often lacks the ability to provide extensive comparative summary. In this work, we firstly focus on the independent literature summarization step and introduce ChatCite, an LLM agent with human workflow guidance for comparative literature summary. This agent, by mimicking the human workflow, first extracts key elements from relevant literature and then generates summaries using a Reflective Incremental Mechanism. In order to better evaluate the quality of the generated summaries, we devised a LLM-based automatic evaluation metric, G-Score, in refer to the human evaluation criteria. The ChatCite agent outperformed other models in various dimensions in the experiments. The literature summaries generated by ChatCite can also be directly used for drafting literature reviews.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.244
Volume:
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3613–3630
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.244/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yutong Li, Lu Chen, Aiwei Liu, Kai Yu, and Lijie Wen. 2025. ChatCite: LLM Agent with Human Workflow Guidance for Comparative Literature Summary. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 3613–3630, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
ChatCite: LLM Agent with Human Workflow Guidance for Comparative Literature Summary (Li et al., COLING 2025)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.244.pdf