A Hierarchical Framework for Measuring Scientific Paper Innovation via Large Language Models

Measuring scientific paper innovation is both important and challenging. Existing content-based methods often overlook the full-paper context, fail to capture the full scope of innovation, and lack generalization. We propose HSPIM, a hierarchical and training-free framework based on large language models (LLMs). It introduces a Paper-to-Sections-to-QAs decomposition to assess innovation. We segment the text by section titles and use zero-shot LLM prompting to implement section classification, question-answering (QA) augmentation, and weighted innovation scoring. The generated QA pair focuses on section-level innovation and serves as additional context to improve the LLM scoring. For each chunk, the LLM outputs a novelty score and a confidence score. We use confidence scores as weights to aggregate novelty scores into a paper-level innovation score. To further improve performance, we propose a two-layer question structure consisting of common and section-specific questions, and apply a genetic algorithm to optimize the question-prompt combinations. Furthermore, under the fine-grained structure of innovation, we extend HSPIM to an HSPIM$^+$ that generates novelty, contribution, and feasibility scores with respective confidence scores. Comprehensive experiments on scientific conference paper datasets show that HSPIM outperforms baseline methods in effectiveness, generalization, and interpretability. Demo code is available at https://github.com/Jasaxion/HSPIM.