Automatically detecting open academic review praise and criticism

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Emerald in Online Information Review on 15 June 2020. The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version, accessible at https://doi.org/10.1108/OIR-11-2019-0347.Purpose: Peer reviewer evaluations of academic papers are known to be variable in content and overall judgements but are important academic publishing safeguards. This article introduces a sentiment analysis program, PeerJudge, to detect praise and criticism in peer evaluations. It is designed to support editorial management decisions and reviewers in the scholarly publishing process and for grant funding decision workflows. The initial version of PeerJudge is tailored for reviews from F1000Research’s open peer review publishing platform. Design/methodology/approach: PeerJudge uses a lexical sentiment analysis approach with a human-coded initial sentiment lexicon and machine learning adjustments and additions. It was built with an F1000Research development corpus and evaluated on a different F1000Research test corpus using reviewer ratings. Findings: PeerJudge can predict F1000Research judgements from negative evaluations in reviewers’ comments more accurately than baseline approaches, although not from positive reviewer comments, which seem to be largely unrelated to reviewer decisions. Within the F1000Research mode of post-publication peer review, the absence of any detected negative comments is a reliable indicator that an article will be ‘approved’, but the presence of moderately negative comments could lead to either an approved or approved with reservations decision. Originality/value: PeerJudge is the first transparent AI approach to peer review sentiment detection. It may be used to identify anomalous reviews with text potentially not matching judgements for individual checks or systematic bias assessments

Peer Review Analyze: A Novel Benchmark Resource for Computational Analysis of Peer Reviews

Peer Review is at the heart of scholarly communications and the cornerstone of scientific publishing. However, academia often criticizes the peer review system as non-transparent, biased, arbitrary, a flawed process at the heart of science, leading to researchers arguing with its reliability and quality. These problems could also be due to the lack of studies with the peer-review texts for various proprietary and confidentiality clauses. Peer review texts could serve as a rich source of Natural Language Processing (NLP) research on understanding the scholarly communication landscape, and thereby build systems towards mitigating those pertinent problems. In this work, we present a first of its kind multi-layered dataset of 1199 open peer review texts manually annotated at the sentence level (*17k sentences) across the four layers, viz. Paper Section Correspondence, Paper Aspect Category, Review Functionality, and Review Significance. Given a text written by the reviewer, we annotate: to which sections (e.g., Methodology, Experiments, etc.), what aspects (e.g., Originality/Novelty, Empirical/Theoretical Soundness, etc.) of the paper does the review text correspond to, what is the role played by the review text (e.g., appreciation, criticism, summary, etc.), and the importance of the review statement (major, minor, general) within the review. We also annotate the sentiment of the reviewer (positive, negative, neutral) for the first two layers to judge the reviewer’s perspective on the different sections and aspects of the paper. We further introduce four novel tasks with this dataset, which could serve as an indicator of the exhaustiveness of a peer review and can be a step towards the automatic judgment of review quality. We also present baseline experiments and results for the different tasks for further investigations. We believe our dataset would provide a benchmark experimental testbed for automated systems to leverage on current NLP state-of-the-art techniques to address different issues with peer review quality, thereby ushering increased transparency and trust on the holy grail of scientific research validation

The ACL OCL Corpus: advancing Open science in Computational Linguistics

We present a scholarly corpus from the ACL Anthology to assist Open scientific research in the Computational Linguistics domain, named as ACL OCL. Compared with previous ARC and AAN versions, ACL OCL includes structured full-texts with logical sections, references to figures, and links to a large knowledge resource (semantic scholar). ACL OCL contains 74k scientific papers, together with 210k figures extracted up to September 2022. To observe the development in the computational linguistics domain, we detect the topics of all OCL papers with a supervised neural model. We observe ''Syntax: Tagging, Chunking and Parsing'' topic is significantly shrinking and ''Natural Language Generation'' is resurging. Our dataset is open and available to download from HuggingFace in https://huggingface.co/datasets/ACL-OCL/ACL-OCL-Corpus

Can Amazon.com reviews help to assess the wider impacts of books?

University of Wolverhampto

Unleashing the Potential of Argument Mining for IS Research: A Systematic Review and Research Agenda

Argument mining (AM) represents the unique use of natural language processing (NLP) techniques to extract arguments from unstructured data automatically. Despite expanding on commonly used NLP techniques, such as sentiment analysis, AM has hardly been applied in information systems (IS) research yet. Consequentially, knowledge about the potentials for the usage of AM on IS use cases appears to be still limited. First, we introduce AM and its current usage in fields beyond IS. To address this research gap, we conducted a systematic literature review on IS literature to identify IS use cases that can potentially be extended with AM. We develop eleven text-based IS research topics that provide structure and context to the use cases and their AM potentials. Finally, we formulate a novel research agenda to guide both researchers and practitioners to design, compare and evaluate the use of AM for text-based applications and research streams in IS

Web indicators for research evaluation. Part 3: books and non standard outputs

This literature review describes web indicators for the impact of books, software, datasets, videos and other non-standard academic outputs. Although journal articles dominate academic research in the health and natural sciences, other types of outputs can make equally valuable contributions to scholarship and are more common in other fields. It is not always possible to get useful citation-based impact indicators for these due to their absence from, or incomplete coverage in, traditional citation indexes. In this context, the web is particularly valuable as a potential source of impact indicators for non-standard academic outputs. The main focus in this review is on books because of the much greater amount of relevant research for them and because they are regarded as particularly valuable in the arts and humanities and in some areas of the social sciences

Your Paper has been Accepted, Rejected, or Whatever: Automatic Generation of Scientific Paper Reviews

4noPeer review is widely viewed as an essential step for ensuring scientific quality of a work and is a cornerstone of scholarly publishing. On the other hand, the actors involved in the publishing process are often driven by incentives which may, and increasingly do, undermine the quality of published work, especially in the presence of unethical conduits. In this work we investigate the feasibility of a tool capable of generating fake reviews for a given scientific paper automatically. While a tool of this kind cannot possibly deceive any rigorous editorial procedure, it could nevertheless find a role in several questionable scenarios and magnify the scale of scholarly frauds. A key feature of our tool is that it is built upon a small knowledge base, which is very important in our context due to the difficulty of finding large amounts of scientific reviews. We experimentally assessed our method 16 human subjects. We presented to these subjects a mix of genuine and machine generated reviews and we measured the ability of our proposal to actually deceive subjects judgment. The results highlight the ability of our method to produce reviews that often look credible and may subvert the decision.partially_openembargoed_20160915Bartoli, Alberto; De Lorenzo, Andrea; Medvet, Eric; Tarlao, FabianoBartoli, Alberto; DE LORENZO, Andrea; Medvet, Eric; Tarlao, Fabian

Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis of Scientific Reviews

Scientific papers are complex and understanding the usefulness of these papers requires prior knowledge. Peer reviews are comments on a paper provided by designated experts on that field and hold a substantial amount of information, not only for the editors and chairs to make the final decision, but also to judge the potential impact of the paper. In this paper, we propose to use aspect-based sentiment analysis of scientific reviews to be able to extract useful information, which correlates well with the accept/reject decision. While working on a dataset of close to 8k reviews from ICLR, one of the top conferences in the field of machine learning, we use an active learning framework to build a training dataset for aspect prediction, which is further used to obtain the aspects and sentiments for the entire dataset. We show that the distribution of aspect-based sentiments obtained from a review is significantly different for accepted and rejected papers. We use the aspect sentiments from these reviews to make an intriguing observation, certain aspects present in a paper and discussed in the review strongly determine the final recommendation. As a second objective, we quantify the extent of disagreement among the reviewers refereeing a paper. We also investigate the extent of disagreement between the reviewers and the chair and find that the inter-reviewer disagreement may have a link to the disagreement with the chair. One of the most interesting observations from this study is that reviews, where the reviewer score and the aspect sentiments extracted from the review text written by the reviewer are consistent, are also more likely to be concurrent with the chair's decision.Comment: Accepted in JCDL'2