Re-examining lexical and semantic attention: Dual-view graph convolutions enhanced BERT for academic paper rating

Automatically assessing academic papers has enormous potential to reduce peer-review burden and individual bias. Existing studies strive for building sophisticated deep neural networks to identify academic value based on comprehensive data, e.g., academic graphs and full papers. However, these data are not always easy to access. And the content of the paper rather than other features outside the paper should matter in a fair assessment. Furthermore, while BERT models can maintain general semantics by pre-training on large-scale corpora, they tend to be over-smoothing due to stacked self-attention layers among unfiltered input tokens. Therefore, it is nontrivial to figure out distinguishable value of an academic paper from its limited content. In this study, we propose a novel deep neural network, namely Dual-view Graph Convolutions Enhanced BERT (DGC-BERT), for academic paper acceptance estimation. We combine the title and abstract of the paper as input. Then, a pre-trained BERT model is employed to extract the paper’s general representations. Apart from hidden representations of the final layer, we highlight the first and last few layers as lexical and semantic views. In particular, we re-examine the dual-view filtered self-attention matrices via constructing two graphs, respectively. After that, two multi-hop Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) are separately employed to capture pivotal and distant dependencies between the tokens. Moreover, the dual-view representations are facilitated by each other with biaffine attention modules. And a re-weighting gate is proposed to further streamline the dual-view representations with the help of the original BERT representation. Finally, whether the submitted paper could be acceptable is predicted based on the original language model features cooperated with the dual-view dependencies. Extensive data analyses and the full paper based MHCNN studies provide insights into the task and structural functions. Comparison experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed DGC-BERT significantly outperforms alternative approaches, especially the state-of-the-art models like MHCNN and BERT variants. Additional analyses reveal significance and explainability of the proposed modules in the DGC-BERT. Our codes and settings have been released on Github (https://github.com/ECNU-Text-Computing/DGC-BERT).