Metag: A dataset to build agentic meta-reviewing capabilities
Organizations: Microsoft · Georgia Institute of Technology
Abstract
AI tools increasingly support tasks across the scientific research cycle, from experiment design and manuscript preparation to peer review. At the same time, the continuing growth in conference submissions has increased the burden on meta-reviewers, who must synthesize reviewer feedback, author rebuttals, and manuscript revisions. To address this concern, this paper introduces Metag, a dataset to accelerate the development of meta-reviewing agents, specifically to identify changes made to scientific articles during the review-rebuttal process. Each instance contains a reviewer concern, the author's proposed resolution, and the manuscript diffs implementing the stated change. Metag is collected by obtaining manuscript versions from before the review deadline and after acceptance, computing differences between the two documents, and asking human annotators to align these differences with action items from OpenReview discussions. The resulting dataset consists of 349 high-quality action items tied to paper differences and will enable building methods to empower meta reviewers to quickly identify whether authors have addressed reviewer statements and where in the paper those changes have been made, resulting in additional transparency and traceability throughout peer review. The dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/microsoft/Metag-dataset.
Figures & tables
| Dataset | # Samples | Scientific Reviews | Edits | Task |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| cPAPERS [ 18 ] | 5,030 | ✓ | ✗ | Question-Answering |
| SciDQA [ 16 ] | 2,937 | ✓ | ✗ | Question-Answering |
| ORSUM [ 24 ] | 57,536 | ✓ | ✗ | Opinion Summarization |
| Revise and Resubmit [ 12 ] | 21,289 | ✓ | ✗ | Edit Intent Class. |
| TETRA [ 14 ] | 1,368 | ✗ | ✓ | Document Revision |
| arXivEdits [ 8 ] | 13,008 | ✗ | ✓ | Edit Intent Class. |
| Split | Samples | Papers | Diffs | Diffs/sample | Relevant/sample | Input tokens |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Train | 248 | 93 | 219,569 | 885.4 | 6.28 | 2,880,154 |
| Validation | 41 | 22 | 41,445 | 1,010.9 | 6.66 | 2,971,307 |
| Test | 60 | 22 | 62,772 | 1,046.2 | 8.23 | 4,471,357 |
| Total | 349 | 137 | 323,786 | 927.8 | 6.66 | 10,322,818 |
Appendix figures & tables5 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| Field | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
| paper_id | String | Unique paper identifier. |
| action_item | Object | Reviewer concern and author’s description of the revision. |
| all_diffs | List | Candidate changes between the original and revised paper. |
| diff_index | Integer | Candidate’s global index within the paper. |
| tag | String | Edit operation, such as insertion, deletion, or replacement. |
| text_pdf1 | String | Text from the original paper. |
| Metric | Overall | Minimum | Maximum |
|---|---|---|---|
| Exact diff-set match | 37.0% | 25.0% | 46.9% |
| Mean Jaccard | 50.1% | 41.0% | 61.4% |
| Pooled Dice | 49.7% | 44.8% | 62.2% |
| Cohen’s | 0.369 | 0.047 | 0.601 |
| Annotation outcome | Count | Percentage |
|---|---|---|
| Neither annotator identified a diff | 59 | 10.3% |
| Only one annotator identified a diff | 112 | 19.5% |
| Both annotators identified a diff | 404 | 70.3% |
Scholarly Peer Review
Scholarly peer review studies how experts evaluate research, make publication decisions, and improve the fairness, reliability, and transparency of those processes.
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