Towards Automatic Formal Feedback on Scientific Documents

Louise Bloch, Johannes Rückert, Christoph Friedrich


Abstract
This paper introduces IPPOLIS Write, an open source, web-based tool designed to provide automated feedback on the formal aspects of scientific documents. Aimed at addressing the variability in writing and language skills among scientists and the challenges faced by supervisors in providing consistent feedback on student theses, IPPOLIS Write integrates several open source tools and custom implementations to analyze documents for a range of formal issues, including grammatical errors, consistent introduction of acronyms, comparison of literature entries with several databases, referential integrity of figures and tables, and consistent link access dates.IPPOLIS Write generates reports with statistical summaries and annotated documents that highlight specific issues and suggest improvements while also providing additional background information where appropriate. To evaluate its effectiveness, a qualitative assessment is conducted using a small but diverse dataset of bachelor’s and master’s theses sourced from arXiv. Our findings demonstrate the tool’s potential to enhance the quality of scientific documents by providing targeted and consistent feedback, thereby aiding both students and professionals in refining their document preparation skills.
Anthology ID:
2025.bea-1.26
Volume:
Proceedings of the 20th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA 2025)
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Ekaterina Kochmar, Bashar Alhafni, Marie Bexte, Jill Burstein, Andrea Horbach, Ronja Laarmann-Quante, Anaïs Tack, Victoria Yaneva, Zheng Yuan
Venues:
BEA | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
334–344
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.bea-1.26/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Louise Bloch, Johannes Rückert, and Christoph Friedrich. 2025. Towards Automatic Formal Feedback on Scientific Documents. In Proceedings of the 20th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA 2025), pages 334–344, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Towards Automatic Formal Feedback on Scientific Documents (Bloch et al., BEA 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.bea-1.26.pdf