Mahfuza Farooque
2026
Reference-Free Schema Generation for Literature Review Tables via Multi-Faceted Rewards
Sinjoy Saha | Suman Saha | Mahfuza Farooque | Wenpeng Yin
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop)
Sinjoy Saha | Suman Saha | Mahfuza Farooque | Wenpeng Yin
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop)
To accelerate scientific knowledge acquisition, LLMs are increasingly used to synthesize multiple papers into structured tables by inferring schemas and values. While value generation within a fixed schema can often be reduced to extractive question answering, the schema generation problem, determining which dimensions to compare a set of documents, lacks a formal mapping to standard NLP tasks. In this work, we formulate schema generation as a reinforcement learning problem and investigate whether these dimensions can be induced without access to gold-standard schemas. We design a multi-faceted reward framework capturing schema coverage, non-redundancy, relevance, and format, and train a small language model on a literature review dataset. Our approach yields consistent improvements over the untuned base model across intrinsic, reference-based, and LLM-judge metrics, and remains competitive with supervised fine-tuned models at 5× the parameter count on structural and diversity dimensions. All code, results and prompts are available in the GitHub repository: https://github.com/sinjoysaha/rl-schema-generation