ResearchAgent: Iterative Research Idea Generation over Scientific Literature with Large Language Models

Scientific Research, vital for improving human life, is hindered by its inherent complexity, slow pace, and the need for specialized experts. To enhance its productivity, we propose a ResearchAgent, a large language model-powered research idea writing agent, which automatically generates problems, methods, and experiment designs while iteratively refining them based on scientific literature. Specifically, starting with a core paper as the primary focus to generate ideas, our ResearchAgent is augmented not only with relevant publications through connecting information over an academic graph but also entities retrieved from an entity-centric knowledge store based on their underlying concepts, mined and shared across numerous papers. In addition, mirroring the human approach to iteratively improving ideas with peer discussions, we leverage multiple ReviewingAgents that provide reviews and feedback iteratively. Further, they are instantiated with human preference-aligned large language models whose criteria for evaluation are derived from actual human judgments. We experimentally validate our ResearchAgent on scientific publications across multiple disciplines, showcasing its effectiveness in generating novel, clear, and valid research ideas based on human and model-based evaluation results.

Knowledge-Centric Templatic Views of Documents

Authors seeking to communicate with broader audiences often compose their ideas about the same underlying knowledge in different documents and formats -- for example, as slide decks, newsletters, reports, brochures, etc. Prior work in document generation has generally considered the creation of each separate format to be different a task, developing independent methods for generation and evaluation. This approach is suboptimal for the advancement of AI-supported content authoring from both research and application perspectives because it leads to fragmented learning processes, redundancy in models and methods, and disjointed evaluation. Thus, in our work, we consider each of these documents to be templatic views of the same underlying knowledge, and we aim to unify the generation and evaluation of these templatic views of documents. We begin by introducing an LLM-powered method to extract the most important information from an input document and represent this information in a structured format. We show that this unified representation can be used to generate multiple templatic views with no supervision and with very little guidance, improving over strong baselines. We additionally introduce a unified evaluation method that is template agnostic, and can be adapted to building document generators for heterogeneous downstream applications. Finally, we conduct a human evaluation, which shows that humans prefer 82% of the downstream documents generated with our method. Furthermore, the newly proposed evaluation metric correlates more highly with human judgement than prior metrics, while providing a unified evaluation method.

Knowledge-Augmented Large Language Models for Personalized Contextual Query Suggestion

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at tackling various natural language tasks. However, due to the significant costs involved in re-training or fine-tuning them, they remain largely static and difficult to personalize. Nevertheless, a variety of applications could benefit from generations that are tailored to users' preferences, goals, and knowledge. Among them is web search, where knowing what a user is trying to accomplish, what they care about, and what they know can lead to improved search experiences. In this work, we propose a novel and general approach that augments an LLM with relevant context from users' interaction histories with a search engine in order to personalize its outputs. Specifically, we construct an entity-centric knowledge store for each user based on their search and browsing activities on the web, which is then leveraged to provide contextually relevant LLM prompt augmentations. This knowledge store is light-weight, since it only produces user-specific aggregate projections of interests and knowledge onto public knowledge graphs, and leverages existing search log infrastructure, thereby mitigating the privacy, compliance, and scalability concerns associated with building deep user profiles for personalization. We then validate our approach on the task of contextual query suggestion, which requires understanding not only the user's current search context but also what they historically know and care about. Through a number of experiments based on human evaluation, we show that our approach is significantly better than several other LLM-powered baselines, generating query suggestions that are contextually more relevant, personalized, and useful.

Modeling Tag Prediction based on Question Tagging Behavior Analysis of CommunityQA Platform Users

In community question-answering platforms, tags play essential roles in effective information organization and retrieval, better question routing, faster response to questions, and assessment of topic popularity. Hence, automatic assistance for predicting and suggesting tags for posts is of high utility to users of such platforms. To develop better tag prediction across diverse communities and domains, we performed a thorough analysis of users' tagging behavior in 17 StackExchange communities. We found various common inherent properties of this behavior in those diverse domains. We used the findings to develop a flexible neural tag prediction architecture, which predicts both popular tags and more granular tags for each question. Our extensive experiments and obtained performance show the effectiveness of our model