Can LLMs Generate Tabular Summaries of Science Papers? Rethinking the Evaluation Protocol

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2504.10284v2
• Date: Tue, 22 Apr 2025 03:09:56 GMT
• Title: Can LLMs Generate Tabular Summaries of Science Papers? Rethinking the Evaluation Protocol
• Authors: Weiqi Wang, Jiefu Ou, Yangqiu Song, Benjamin Van Durme, Daniel Khashabi,
• Abstract summary: Literature review tables are essential for summarizing and comparing collections of scientific papers.<n>We explore the task of generating tables that best fulfill a user's informational needs given a collection of scientific papers.<n>Our contributions focus on three key challenges encountered in real-world use: (i) User prompts are often under-specified; (ii) Retrieved candidate papers frequently contain irrelevant content; and (iii) Task evaluation should move beyond shallow text similarity techniques.
• Score: 83.90769864167301
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Literature review tables are essential for summarizing and comparing collections of scientific papers. We explore the task of generating tables that best fulfill a user's informational needs given a collection of scientific papers. Building on recent work (Newman et al., 2024), we extend prior approaches to address real-world complexities through a combination of LLM-based methods and human annotations. Our contributions focus on three key challenges encountered in real-world use: (i) User prompts are often under-specified; (ii) Retrieved candidate papers frequently contain irrelevant content; and (iii) Task evaluation should move beyond shallow text similarity techniques and instead assess the utility of inferred tables for information-seeking tasks (e.g., comparing papers). To support reproducible evaluation, we introduce ARXIV2TABLE, a more realistic and challenging benchmark for this task, along with a novel approach to improve literature review table generation in real-world scenarios. Our extensive experiments on this benchmark show that both open-weight and proprietary LLMs struggle with the task, highlighting its difficulty and the need for further advancements. Our dataset and code are available at https://github.com/JHU-CLSP/arXiv2Table.

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