Structural Vetting of Academic Proposals

Abstract

Increasing postgraduate enrollments gives rise to many proposal documents required for vetting and human supervision. Reading and comprehension of large documents is a boring and somewhat difficult task for humans which can be delegated to machines. One way of assisting supervisors with this routine screening of academic proposals is to provide an artificial intelligent (AI) tool for initial structural vetting— checking if sections of proposals are complete and appear where they are supposed to. Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques in AI for document vetting has been applied in legal and financial domains. However, in academia, available tools only perform tasks such as checking proposals for plagiarism, spellings or grammar, word editing, and not structural vetting of academic proposal. This paper presents a tool named Auto-proofreader that attempts to perform the task of structural document review of proposals on behalf of the human expert using formal techniques and document structure understanding hinged on context free grammar rules (CFGs). The experimental results on a corpus of 20 academic proposals using confusion matrix technique for evaluation gives an overall of 87% accuracy. This tool is expected to be a useful aid in postgraduate supervision for vetting students’ academic proposals.