Erin Bransom

Kalpesh Krishna, Erin Bransom, Bailey Kuehl et al. · allen-ai, deepmind

While human evaluation remains best practice for accurately judging the faithfulness of automatically-generated summaries, few solutions exist to address the increased difficulty and workload when evaluating long-form summaries. Through a survey of 162 papers on long-form summarization, we first shed light on current human evaluation practices surrounding long-form summaries. We find that 73% of these papers do not perform any human evaluation on model-generated summaries, while other works face new difficulties that manifest when dealing with long documents (e.g., low inter-annotator agreement). Motivated by our survey, we present LongEval, a set of guidelines for human evaluation of faithfulness in long-form summaries that addresses the following challenges: (1) How can we achieve high inter-annotator agreement on faithfulness scores? (2) How can we minimize annotator workload while maintaining accurate faithfulness scores? and (3) Do humans benefit from automated alignment between summary and source snippets? We deploy LongEval in annotation studies on two long-form summarization datasets in different domains (SQuALITY and PubMed), and we find that switching to a finer granularity of judgment (e.g., clause-level) reduces inter-annotator variance in faithfulness scores (e.g., std-dev from 18.5 to 6.8). We also show that scores from a partial annotation of fine-grained units highly correlates with scores from a full annotation workload (0.89 Kendall's tau using 50% judgments). We release our human judgments, annotation templates, and our software as a Python library for future research.

Kyle Lo, Joseph Chee Chang, Andrew Head et al. · allen-ai, cmu

Scholarly publications are key to the transfer of knowledge from scholars to others. However, research papers are information-dense, and as the volume of the scientific literature grows, the need for new technology to support the reading process grows. In contrast to the process of finding papers, which has been transformed by Internet technology, the experience of reading research papers has changed little in decades. The PDF format for sharing research papers is widely used due to its portability, but it has significant downsides including: static content, poor accessibility for low-vision readers, and difficulty reading on mobile devices. This paper explores the question "Can recent advances in AI and HCI power intelligent, interactive, and accessible reading interfaces -- even for legacy PDFs?" We describe the Semantic Reader Project, a collaborative effort across multiple institutions to explore automatic creation of dynamic reading interfaces for research papers. Through this project, we've developed ten research prototype interfaces and conducted usability studies with more than 300 participants and real-world users showing improved reading experiences for scholars. We've also released a production reading interface for research papers that will incorporate the best features as they mature. We structure this paper around challenges scholars and the public face when reading research papers -- Discovery, Efficiency, Comprehension, Synthesis, and Accessibility -- and present an overview of our progress and remaining open challenges.

Matt Deitke, Christopher Clark, Sangho Lee et al. · allen-ai

Today's most advanced vision-language models (VLMs) remain proprietary. The strongest open-weight models rely heavily on synthetic data from proprietary VLMs to achieve good performance, effectively distilling these closed VLMs into open ones. As a result, the community has been missing foundational knowledge about how to build performant VLMs from scratch. We present Molmo, a new family of VLMs that are state-of-the-art in their class of openness. Our key contribution is a collection of new datasets called PixMo, including a dataset of highly detailed image captions for pre-training, a free-form image Q&A dataset for fine-tuning, and an innovative 2D pointing dataset, all collected without the use of external VLMs. The success of our approach relies on careful modeling choices, a well-tuned training pipeline, and, most critically, the quality of our newly collected datasets. Our best-in-class 72B model not only outperforms others in the class of open weight and data models, but also outperforms larger proprietary models including Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Gemini 1.5 Pro and Flash, second only to GPT-4o based on both academic benchmarks and on a large human evaluation. Our model weights, new datasets, and source code are available at https://molmo.allenai.org/blog.

Ben Bogin, Kejuan Yang, Shashank Gupta et al. · allen-ai

Given that Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant progress in writing code, can they now be used to autonomously reproduce results from research repositories? Such a capability would be a boon to the research community, helping researchers validate, understand, and extend prior work. To advance towards this goal, we introduce SUPER, the first benchmark designed to evaluate the capability of LLMs in setting up and executing tasks from research repositories. SUPERaims to capture the realistic challenges faced by researchers working with Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) research repositories. Our benchmark comprises three distinct problem sets: 45 end-to-end problems with annotated expert solutions, 152 sub problems derived from the expert set that focus on specific challenges (e.g., configuring a trainer), and 602 automatically generated problems for larger-scale development. We introduce various evaluation measures to assess both task success and progress, utilizing gold solutions when available or approximations otherwise. We show that state-of-the-art approaches struggle to solve these problems with the best model (GPT-4o) solving only 16.3% of the end-to-end set, and 46.1% of the scenarios. This illustrates the challenge of this task, and suggests that SUPER can serve as a valuable resource for the community to make and measure progress.

Yuze Lou, Bailey Kuehl, Erin Bransom et al. · allen-ai, cmu

Entity linking (EL) is the task of linking a textual mention to its corresponding entry in a knowledge base, and is critical for many knowledge-intensive NLP applications. When applied to tables in scientific papers, EL is a step toward large-scale scientific knowledge bases that could enable advanced scientific question answering and analytics. We present the first dataset for EL in scientific tables. EL for scientific tables is especially challenging because scientific knowledge bases can be very incomplete, and disambiguating table mentions typically requires understanding the papers's tet in addition to the table. Our dataset, S2abEL, focuses on EL in machine learning results tables and includes hand-labeled cell types, attributed sources, and entity links from the PaperswithCode taxonomy for 8,429 cells from 732 tables. We introduce a neural baseline method designed for EL on scientific tables containing many out-of-knowledge-base mentions, and show that it significantly outperforms a state-of-the-art generic table EL method. The best baselines fall below human performance, and our analysis highlights avenues for improvement.

Mike D'Arcy, Alexis Ross, Erin Bransom et al. · allen-ai

We introduce the task of automatically revising scientific papers based on peer feedback and release ARIES, a dataset of review comments and their corresponding paper edits. The data is drawn from real reviewer-author interactions from computer science, and we provide labels linking each reviewer comment to the specific paper edits made by the author in response. We automatically create a high-precision silver training set, as well as an expert-labeled test set that shows high inter-annotator agreement. In experiments with 10 models covering the state of the art, we find that they struggle even to identify which edits correspond to a comment -- especially when the relationship between the edit and the comment is indirect and requires reasoning to uncover. We also extensively analyze GPT-4's ability to generate edits given a comment and the original paper. We find that it often succeeds on a superficial level, but tends to rigidly follow the wording of the feedback rather than the underlying intent, and lacks technical details compared to human-written edits.

Chao-Chun Hsu, Erin Bransom, Jenna Sparks et al. · allen-ai, uw

Literature review requires researchers to synthesize a large amount of information and is increasingly challenging as the scientific literature expands. In this work, we investigate the potential of LLMs for producing hierarchical organizations of scientific studies to assist researchers with literature review. We define hierarchical organizations as tree structures where nodes refer to topical categories and every node is linked to the studies assigned to that category. Our naive LLM-based pipeline for hierarchy generation from a set of studies produces promising yet imperfect hierarchies, motivating us to collect CHIME, an expert-curated dataset for this task focused on biomedicine. Given the challenging and time-consuming nature of building hierarchies from scratch, we use a human-in-the-loop process in which experts correct errors (both links between categories and study assignment) in LLM-generated hierarchies. CHIME contains 2,174 LLM-generated hierarchies covering 472 topics, and expert-corrected hierarchies for a subset of 100 topics. Expert corrections allow us to quantify LLM performance, and we find that while they are quite good at generating and organizing categories, their assignment of studies to categories could be improved. We attempt to train a corrector model with human feedback which improves study assignment by 12.6 F1 points. We release our dataset and models to encourage research on developing better assistive tools for literature review.

Yue Guo, Joseph Chee Chang, Maria Antoniak et al. · allen-ai, uw

Scientific jargon can impede researchers when they read materials from other domains. Current methods of jargon identification mainly use corpus-level familiarity indicators (e.g., Simple Wikipedia represents plain language). However, researchers' familiarity of a term can vary greatly based on their own background. We collect a dataset of over 10K term familiarity annotations from 11 computer science researchers for terms drawn from 100 paper abstracts. Analysis of this data reveals that jargon familiarity and information needs vary widely across annotators, even within the same sub-domain (e.g., NLP). We investigate features representing individual, sub-domain, and domain knowledge to predict individual jargon familiarity. We compare supervised and prompt-based approaches, finding that prompt-based methods including personal publications yields the highest accuracy, though zero-shot prompting provides a strong baseline. This research offers insight into features and methods to integrate personal data into scientific jargon identification.

Aakanksha Naik, Bailey Kuehl, Erin Bransom et al. · allen-ai, cmu

Extracting fine-grained experimental findings from literature can provide dramatic utility for scientific applications. Prior work has developed annotation schemas and datasets for limited aspects of this problem, failing to capture the real-world complexity and nuance required. Focusing on biomedicine, this work presents CARE -- a new IE dataset for the task of extracting clinical findings. We develop a new annotation schema capturing fine-grained findings as n-ary relations between entities and attributes, which unifies phenomena challenging for current IE systems such as discontinuous entity spans, nested relations, variable arity n-ary relations and numeric results in a single schema. We collect extensive annotations for 700 abstracts from two sources: clinical trials and case reports. We also demonstrate the generalizability of our schema to the computer science and materials science domains. We benchmark state-of-the-art IE systems on CARE, showing that even models such as GPT4 struggle. We release our resources to advance research on extracting and aggregating literature findings.

Peter Jansen, Marc-Alexandre Côté, Tushar Khot et al.

Automated scientific discovery promises to accelerate progress across scientific domains. However, developing and evaluating an AI agent's capacity for end-to-end scientific reasoning is challenging as running real-world experiments is often prohibitively expensive or infeasible. In this work we introduce DISCOVERYWORLD, the first virtual environment for developing and benchmarking an agent's ability to perform complete cycles of novel scientific discovery. DISCOVERYWORLD contains a variety of different challenges, covering topics as diverse as radioisotope dating, rocket science, and proteomics, to encourage development of general discovery skills rather than task-specific solutions. DISCOVERYWORLD itself is an inexpensive, simulated, text-based environment (with optional 2D visual overlay). It includes 120 different challenge tasks, spanning eight topics each with three levels of difficulty and several parametric variations. Each task requires an agent to form hypotheses, design and run experiments, analyze results, and act on conclusions. DISCOVERYWORLD further provides three automatic metrics for evaluating performance, based on (a) task completion, (b) task-relevant actions taken, and (c) the discovered explanatory knowledge. We find that strong baseline agents, that perform well in prior published environments, struggle on most DISCOVERYWORLD tasks, suggesting that DISCOVERYWORLD captures some of the novel challenges of discovery, and thus that DISCOVERYWORLD may help accelerate near-term development and assessment of scientific discovery competency in agents. Code available at: www.github.com/allenai/discoveryworld

Lucy Lu Wang, Yulia Otmakhova, Jay DeYoung et al.

Evaluating multi-document summarization (MDS) quality is difficult. This is especially true in the case of MDS for biomedical literature reviews, where models must synthesize contradicting evidence reported across different documents. Prior work has shown that rather than performing the task, models may exploit shortcuts that are difficult to detect using standard n-gram similarity metrics such as ROUGE. Better automated evaluation metrics are needed, but few resources exist to assess metrics when they are proposed. Therefore, we introduce a dataset of human-assessed summary quality facets and pairwise preferences to encourage and support the development of better automated evaluation methods for literature review MDS. We take advantage of community submissions to the Multi-document Summarization for Literature Review (MSLR) shared task to compile a diverse and representative sample of generated summaries. We analyze how automated summarization evaluation metrics correlate with lexical features of generated summaries, to other automated metrics including several we propose in this work, and to aspects of human-assessed summary quality. We find that not only do automated metrics fail to capture aspects of quality as assessed by humans, in many cases the system rankings produced by these metrics are anti-correlated with rankings according to human annotators.