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.

Prior research has shown that typical fact-checking models for stand-alone claims struggle with claims made in conversation. As a solution, fine-tuning these models on dialogue data has been proposed. However, creating separate models for each use case is impractical, and we show that fine-tuning models for dialogue results in poor performance on typical fact-checking. To overcome this challenge, we present techniques that allow us to use the same models for both dialogue and typical fact-checking. These mainly focus on retrieval adaptation and transforming conversational inputs so that they can be accurately processed by models trained on stand-alone claims. We demonstrate that a typical fact-checking model incorporating these techniques is competitive with state-of-the-art models for dialogue, while maintaining its performance on stand-alone claims.