Literature-Grounded Novelty Assessment of Scientific Ideas

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Shahid, Simra, Radensky, Marissa, Fok, Raymond, Siangliulue, Pao, Weld, Daniel S., Hope, Tom
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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_version_ 1866913914949730304
author Shahid, Simra
Radensky, Marissa
Fok, Raymond
Siangliulue, Pao
Weld, Daniel S.
Hope, Tom
author_facet Shahid, Simra
Radensky, Marissa
Fok, Raymond
Siangliulue, Pao
Weld, Daniel S.
Hope, Tom
contents Automated scientific idea generation systems have made remarkable progress, yet the automatic evaluation of idea novelty remains a critical and underexplored challenge. Manual evaluation of novelty through literature review is labor-intensive, prone to error due to subjectivity, and impractical at scale. To address these issues, we propose the Idea Novelty Checker, an LLM-based retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) framework that leverages a two-stage retrieve-then-rerank approach. The Idea Novelty Checker first collects a broad set of relevant papers using keyword and snippet-based retrieval, then refines this collection through embedding-based filtering followed by facet-based LLM re-ranking. It incorporates expert-labeled examples to guide the system in comparing papers for novelty evaluation and in generating literature-grounded reasoning. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that our novelty checker achieves approximately 13% higher agreement than existing approaches. Ablation studies further showcases the importance of the facet-based re-ranker in identifying the most relevant literature for novelty evaluation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_22026
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Literature-Grounded Novelty Assessment of Scientific Ideas
Shahid, Simra
Radensky, Marissa
Fok, Raymond
Siangliulue, Pao
Weld, Daniel S.
Hope, Tom
Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
I.2; H.3
Automated scientific idea generation systems have made remarkable progress, yet the automatic evaluation of idea novelty remains a critical and underexplored challenge. Manual evaluation of novelty through literature review is labor-intensive, prone to error due to subjectivity, and impractical at scale. To address these issues, we propose the Idea Novelty Checker, an LLM-based retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) framework that leverages a two-stage retrieve-then-rerank approach. The Idea Novelty Checker first collects a broad set of relevant papers using keyword and snippet-based retrieval, then refines this collection through embedding-based filtering followed by facet-based LLM re-ranking. It incorporates expert-labeled examples to guide the system in comparing papers for novelty evaluation and in generating literature-grounded reasoning. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that our novelty checker achieves approximately 13% higher agreement than existing approaches. Ablation studies further showcases the importance of the facet-based re-ranker in identifying the most relevant literature for novelty evaluation.
title Literature-Grounded Novelty Assessment of Scientific Ideas
topic Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
I.2; H.3
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.22026