SEAGraph: Unveiling the Whole Story of Paper Review Comments

TL;DR

SEAGraph is a framework that enhances understanding of peer review comments by constructing semantic and hierarchical graphs to clarify reviewer intentions, thereby improving the review process's transparency and efficiency.

Contribution

This paper introduces SEAGraph, a novel graph-based approach that uncovers reviewer intentions to better explain and clarify review comments for authors.

Findings

SEAGraph outperforms existing methods in review comment understanding tasks.

It significantly improves authors' comprehension of review feedback.

The framework facilitates more efficient and transparent peer review processes.

Abstract

Peer review, as a cornerstone of scientific research, ensures the integrity and quality of scholarly work by providing authors with objective feedback for refinement. However, in the traditional peer review process, authors often receive vague or insufficiently detailed feedback, which provides limited assistance and leads to a more time-consuming review cycle. If authors can identify some specific weaknesses in their paper, they can not only address the reviewer's concerns but also improve their work. This raises the critical question of how to enhance authors' comprehension of review comments. In this paper, we present SEAGraph, a novel framework developed to clarify review comments by uncovering the underlying intentions behind them. We construct two types of graphs for each paper: the semantic mind graph, which captures the authors' thought process, and the hierarchical background graph, which delineates the research domains related to the paper. A retrieval method is then designed to extract relevant content from both graphs, facilitating coherent explanations for the review comments. Extensive experiments show that SEAGraph excels in review comment understanding tasks, offering significant benefits to authors. By bridging the gap between reviewers' critiques and authors' comprehension, SEAGraph contributes to a more efficient, transparent and collaborative scientific publishing ecosystem.