Beyond "Not Novel Enough": Enriching Scholarly Critique with LLM-Assisted Feedback

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Afzal, Osama Mohammed, Nakov, Preslav, Hope, Tom, Gurevych, Iryna
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Afzal, Osama Mohammed
Nakov, Preslav
Hope, Tom
Gurevych, Iryna
author_facet Afzal, Osama Mohammed
Nakov, Preslav
Hope, Tom
Gurevych, Iryna
contents Novelty assessment is a central yet understudied aspect of peer review, particularly in high volume fields like NLP where reviewer capacity is increasingly strained. We present a structured approach for automated novelty evaluation that models expert reviewer behavior through three stages: content extraction from submissions, retrieval and synthesis of related work, and structured comparison for evidence based assessment. Our method is informed by a large scale analysis of human written novelty reviews and captures key patterns such as independent claim verification and contextual reasoning. Evaluated on 182 ICLR 2025 submissions with human annotated reviewer novelty assessments, the approach achieves 86.5% alignment with human reasoning and 75.3% agreement on novelty conclusions - substantially outperforming existing LLM based baselines. The method produces detailed, literature aware analyses and improves consistency over ad hoc reviewer judgments. These results highlight the potential for structured LLM assisted approaches to support more rigorous and transparent peer review without displacing human expertise. Data and code are made available.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_10795
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Beyond "Not Novel Enough": Enriching Scholarly Critique with LLM-Assisted Feedback
Afzal, Osama Mohammed
Nakov, Preslav
Hope, Tom
Gurevych, Iryna
Computation and Language
Novelty assessment is a central yet understudied aspect of peer review, particularly in high volume fields like NLP where reviewer capacity is increasingly strained. We present a structured approach for automated novelty evaluation that models expert reviewer behavior through three stages: content extraction from submissions, retrieval and synthesis of related work, and structured comparison for evidence based assessment. Our method is informed by a large scale analysis of human written novelty reviews and captures key patterns such as independent claim verification and contextual reasoning. Evaluated on 182 ICLR 2025 submissions with human annotated reviewer novelty assessments, the approach achieves 86.5% alignment with human reasoning and 75.3% agreement on novelty conclusions - substantially outperforming existing LLM based baselines. The method produces detailed, literature aware analyses and improves consistency over ad hoc reviewer judgments. These results highlight the potential for structured LLM assisted approaches to support more rigorous and transparent peer review without displacing human expertise. Data and code are made available.
title Beyond "Not Novel Enough": Enriching Scholarly Critique with LLM-Assisted Feedback
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10795