MASSW: A New Dataset and Benchmark Tasks for AI-Assisted Scientific Workflows

TL;DR

MASSW introduces a large, structured dataset of scientific workflows extracted from publications, enabling new AI tasks to improve understanding and navigation of scientific research processes.

Contribution

The paper presents MASSW, a novel dataset with automatically extracted workflow aspects from 152,000 publications, facilitating benchmarking of AI methods for scientific workflow analysis.

Findings

Validated LLM-extracted summaries against human annotations

Demonstrated multiple downstream tasks using MASSW

Showed potential for AI to enhance scientific innovation

Abstract

Scientific innovation relies on detailed workflows, which include critical steps such as analyzing literature, generating ideas, validating these ideas, interpreting results, and inspiring follow-up research. However, scientific publications that document these workflows are extensive and unstructured. This makes it difficult for both human researchers and AI systems to effectively navigate and explore the space of scientific innovation. To address this issue, we introduce MASSW, a comprehensive text dataset on Multi-Aspect Summarization of Scientific Workflows. MASSW includes more than 152,000 peer-reviewed publications from 17 leading computer science conferences spanning the past 50 years. Using Large Language Models (LLMs), we automatically extract five core aspects from these publications -- context, key idea, method, outcome, and projected impact -- which correspond to five key steps in the research workflow. These structured summaries facilitate a variety of downstream tasks and analyses. The quality of the LLM-extracted summaries is validated by comparing them with human annotations. We demonstrate the utility of MASSW through multiple novel machine-learning tasks that can be benchmarked using this new dataset, which make various types of predictions and recommendations along the scientific workflow. MASSW holds significant potential for researchers to create and benchmark new AI methods for optimizing scientific workflows and fostering scientific innovation in the field. Our dataset is openly available at \url{https://github.com/xingjian-zhang/massw}.