SC4ANM: Identifying Optimal Section Combinations for Automated Novelty Prediction in Academic Papers

TL;DR

This study explores how different sections of academic papers can be combined to improve automated prediction of novelty scores using language models, identifying the most effective section combinations for this task.

Contribution

It introduces a method to analyze section combinations in academic papers for predicting novelty, highlighting the importance of specific sections like introduction and results.

Findings

Introduction, results, and discussion combination yields best novelty prediction.

Using entire text does not significantly improve prediction accuracy.

Introduction and results are the most critical sections for novelty assessment.

Abstract

Novelty is a core component of academic papers, and there are multiple perspectives on the assessment of novelty. Existing methods often focus on word or entity combinations, which provide limited insights. The content related to a paper's novelty is typically distributed across different core sections, e.g., Introduction, Methodology and Results. Therefore, exploring the optimal combination of sections for evaluating the novelty of a paper is important for advancing automated novelty assessment. In this paper, we utilize different combinations of sections from academic papers as inputs to drive language models to predict novelty scores. We then analyze the results to determine the optimal section combinations for novelty score prediction. We first employ natural language processing techniques to identify the sectional structure of academic papers, categorizing them into introduction, methods, results, and discussion (IMRaD). Subsequently, we used different combinations of these sections (e.g., introduction and methods) as inputs for pretrained language models (PLMs) and large language models (LLMs), employing novelty scores provided by human expert reviewers as ground truth labels to obtain prediction results. The results indicate that using introduction, results and discussion is most appropriate for assessing the novelty of a paper, while the use of the entire text does not yield significant results. Furthermore, based on the results of the PLMs and LLMs, the introduction and results appear to be the most important section for the task of novelty score prediction. The code and dataset for this paper can be accessed at https://github.com/njust-winchy/SC4ANM.