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genai latex proofreader

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GenAI LaTeX Proofreader

GenAI LaTeX Proofreader is an automated tool that uses generative AI to proofread and suggest improvements to scientific papers written in LaTeX. The suggestions are appended into the original LaTeX source file creating a proofreading report. This tool is primarily intended for authors working on a scientific paper.

In more detail, the generated proofreading report contains the original paper under review, with a list of suggestions attached to the beginning of each section. For each section, feedback is created from the perspective of different proofreading personas. For example, when writing a paper, these could be "Domain expert", "English language expert" and "Book editor". However, the personas could also include additional personas such as "Statistical reviewer", "LaTeX specialist" or "Inclusive language expert" etc depending on the topic of the paper.

Here "proofreading" should be interpreted broadly. While current large language models (LLMs) have an understanding of logic, mathematics and physics, LLMs should not be trusted for serious proofreading of scientific results. Thus, any suggestions should be evaluated critically. On the other hand, for authors familiar with a topic, the generated report can be used to gauge how deeply a LLM can reason about the paper under review.

GenAI LaTeX Proofreader requires a subscription to the Anthropic API.

Example proofreading reports

For development and testing, GenAI LaTeX Proofreader is regularly evaluated by proofreading two test papers:

an empty paper: a paper with no substance.
arxiv:1108.4207: a preprint of one of my earlier papers.

In more detail, these papers are proofread for all manually triggered CI runs in this repo. Thus you can inspect the generated proofreading reports (report.pdf) from recent CI pipeline runs on Github:

example CI run 2024.06.30
all runs with generated reports
Note: downloading the generated reports requires that you are logged in to Github.

Features

Completely automated proofreading of LaTeX documents.

To create a proofreading report, one only needs to run a Python script, which will make calls to a GenAI API and automatically generate a proofreading report. The comments are automatically inserted into the input LaTeX file and compiled into a pdf.
E.g., if the paper is under version control in GitHub, one can use GitHub runners to automatically generate a proofreading report whenever a new version of the paper is checked in.

Supported proofreading personas

✅ Domain expert (implemented)

Critically evaluate each section for correctness and clarity. Identify strengths, weaknesses and provide suggestions for future work.
Also evaluate how well the title, abstract and introduction match the content of the rest of the paper.
Implementation with prompts here.

✅ Language expert (implemented)

Proofread the content for typos, wording, grammar and flow.
Implementation with prompts here.

? Book editor (not yet implemented)

Evaluate the high-level organization of the paper.

? LaTeX specialist (not yet implemented)

Give feedback on your use of LaTeX.

? Peer review for journal (not yet implemented)

See https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.01783 in references below.

? Custom proofreading personas

In addition to the above, one can add other proofreading personas. However, this currently requires that one edit the Python source code.

The idea of using different AI personas for proofreading is inspired by Ethan Mollick's book Co-Intelligence: Living and working with AI published 4/2024.

Limitations

Some structure is assumed for the paper. E.g.
- Content before the first section{..} will not be proofread.
- Unnumbered sections are not supported section*{..}.
- The content of any included files will not be visible to the proofreader.
The GenAI will not see or understand any images or references.
The proofreading report will not be deterministic. Different runs with the same input document may generate different reports.
There are multiple providers that offer access to LLMs, like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google. Currently only Anthropic is supported.
Your paper will be sent over the internet to the LLM provider. Please carefully read their terms of service.
Using LLMs will also incur some cost.
Uses pdflatex and TexLive. TexLive is also used by arxiv, link.
The proofreading comments returned by the LLM provided will in some cases include LaTeX errors. GenAI LaTeX Proofreader will attempt to fix these. However, in some cases the proofreading report may fail to compile.

Getting started

Note that this work is an early proof of concept, so some familiarity with the development tools (git, Python, Docker, Anthropic API access) may be needed to get this working.

The below steps (for Mac/Linux-based systems) describe how to proofread a paper:

Step 1: Clone the repo

git clone [email protected]:genai-latex-proofreader/genai-latex-proofreader.git
cd genai-latex-proofreader

Step 2: Build the Docker container (with Python and Latex)

(cd .devcontainer/latex; make build)

Step 3: Set up secret token to the Anthropic API, see https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/quickstart

export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY='your-secret-api-key-here'

(Note: do not share your ANTHROPIC_API_KEY)

Step 4: Copy the files required to build your paper into the 'paper-to-proofread' subdirectory in the repo.

mkdir paper-to-proofread
cp -R /path/to/your/paper/. paper-to-proofread

For testing you can use a dummy paper tests/integration/assets/empty_paper.tex provided in the repo.

mkdir paper-to-proofread
cp -R tests/integration/assets/. paper-to-proofread/

(Note: Please always have a backup of your paper.)

Step 5: Run genai-latex-proofreader

(cd .devcontainer/latex; docker compose run --rm --entrypoint "python3" genai-latex-proofreader-service -m genai_latex_proofreader.cli --input_latex_path paper-to-proofread/empty_paper.tex --output_report_filepath output/report.tex)

For a medium size paper, this will take a few minutes. If everything worked, the proofreading report can be found in output/report.pdf.

Configuration and customization

Depending on the topic of your paper, you may want to adjust the prompts that define the proofreading personas. Currently the prompts need to be edited directly in the Python source code.

Generative AI

GenAI LaTeX Proofreader uses GenAI (Generative AI) and large language models (LLM) to automate proofreading of scientific papers. As of 2024, GenAI is a quickly evolving technology with rapid developments.

The below list contains some references and related works about this topic, and more broadly about using AI to make scientific discoveries:

12/2023, Microsoft Research, The Impact of Large Language Models on Scientific Discovery: a Preliminary Study using GPT-4
- https://arxiv.org/pdf/2311.07361
10/2023, W. Liang et al., Can large language models provide useful feedback on research papers? A large-scale empirical analysis
- https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.01783
- https://github.com/Weixin-Liang/LLM-scientific-feedback
6/2023, AI to Assist Mathematical Reasoning: A Workshop organized by National Academies of Sciences.
- https://www.nationalacademies.org/event/06-12-2023/ai-to-assist-mathematical-reasoning-a-workshop
- Collection of resources collected as part of the workshop: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kD7H4E28656ua8jOGZ934nbH2HcBLyxcRgFDduH5iQ0/edit

Contributions

Contributions, feedback or ideas are welcome!

Feel free to contact me or raise an issue in this repo.

FAQ

Do I need to cite this work if I use it for a paper?

(This question is outside my area of expertice.)

The guidelines and practices around using AI-content are still evolving. However, for publishing work in an academic setting, please first refer to your advisor, department, journal and/or university.

Please also note that:

AI generated text may reproduce parts verbatim from its training data.
LLM providers may potentially also impose restrictions on usage.
GenAI LaTeX Proofreader is distributed under the terms of the MIT license, see details below. This license puts very few restrictions on how this software can be used, and for normal usage the license require no citation.