Sentiment Analysis of Peer Review Texts for Scholarly Papers

Sentiment analysis has been widely explored in many text domains, including product reviews, movie reviews, tweets, and so on. However, there are very few studies trying to perform sentiment analysis in the domain of peer reviews for scholarly papers, which are usually long and introducing both pros and cons of a paper submission. In this paper, we for the first time investigate the task of automatically predicting the overall recommendation/decision (accept, reject, or sometimes borderline) and further identifying the sentences with positive and negative sentiment polarities from a peer review text written by a reviewer for a paper submission. We propose a multiple instance learning network with a novel abstract-based memory mechanism (MILAM) to address this challenging task. Two evaluation datasets are constructed from the ICLR open reviews and evaluation results verified the efficacy of our proposed model. Our model much outperforms a few existing models in different experimental settings. We also find the generally good consistency between the review texts and the recommended decisions, except for the borderline reviews.