ReviewerGPT? An Exploratory Study on Using Large Language Models for
  Paper Reviewing
Authors: name: Ryan Liu; name: Nihar B. Shah
Published: 2023-06-01 12:45:53

Abstract: Given the rapid ascent of large language models (LLMs), we study the
question: (How) can large language models help in reviewing of scientific
papers or proposals? We first conduct some pilot studies where we find that (i)
GPT-4 outperforms other LLMs (Bard, Vicuna, Koala, Alpaca, LLaMa, Dolly,
OpenAssistant, StableLM), and (ii) prompting with a specific question (e.g., to
identify errors) outperforms prompting to simply write a review. With these
insights, we study the use of LLMs (specifically, GPT-4) for three tasks:
  1. Identifying errors: We construct 13 short computer science papers each
with a deliberately inserted error, and ask the LLM to check for the
correctness of these papers. We observe that the LLM finds errors in 7 of them,
spanning both mathematical and conceptual errors.
  2. Verifying checklists: We task the LLM to verify 16 closed-ended checklist
questions in the respective sections of 15 NeurIPS 2022 papers. We find that
across 119 {checklist question, paper} pairs, the LLM had an 86.6% accuracy.
  3. Choosing the "better" paper: We generate 10 pairs of abstracts,
deliberately designing each pair in such a way that one abstract was clearly
superior than the other. The LLM, however, struggled to discern these
relatively straightforward distinctions accurately, committing errors in its
evaluations for 6 out of the 10 pairs.
  Based on these experiments, we think that LLMs have a promising use as
reviewing assistants for specific reviewing tasks, but not (yet) for complete
evaluations of papers or proposals.