NLPeer: A Unified Resource for the Computational Study of Peer Review

TL;DR

NLPeer provides a comprehensive, multi-domain dataset of peer reviews and papers, enabling systematic NLP research to improve peer review processes with new tasks and structured data.

Contribution

Introduces NLPeer, the first ethically sourced, multi-domain peer review dataset with structured representations, supporting systematic NLP research and new reviewing assistance tasks.

Findings

Created a dataset of over 5,000 papers and 11,000 reviews from five venues.

Established a unified data representation and augmented existing datasets.

Implemented and analyzed three peer review assistance tasks, including a novel guided skimming.

Abstract

Peer review constitutes a core component of scholarly publishing; yet it demands substantial expertise and training, and is susceptible to errors and biases. Various applications of NLP for peer reviewing assistance aim to support reviewers in this complex process, but the lack of clearly licensed datasets and multi-domain corpora prevent the systematic study of NLP for peer review. To remedy this, we introduce NLPeer -- the first ethically sourced multidomain corpus of more than 5k papers and 11k review reports from five different venues. In addition to the new datasets of paper drafts, camera-ready versions and peer reviews from the NLP community, we establish a unified data representation and augment previous peer review datasets to include parsed and structured paper representations, rich metadata and versioning information. We complement our resource with implementations and analysis of three reviewing assistance tasks, including a novel guided skimming task. Our work paves the path towards systematic, multi-faceted, evidence-based study of peer review in NLP and beyond. The data and code are publicly available.