{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/can-large-language-models-discern-evidence","title":"Can Large Language Models Discern Evidence for Scientific Hypotheses? Case Studies in the Social Sciences","arxiv_id":"2309.06578","date":"2023-09-07","proceeding":null,"authors":["Sai Koneru","Jian Wu","Sarah Rajtmajer"],"abstract":"Hypothesis formulation and testing are central to empirical research. A strong hypothesis is a best guess based on existing evidence and informed by a comprehensive view of relevant literature. However, with exponential increase in the number of scientific articles published annually, manual aggregation and synthesis of evidence related to a given hypothesis is a challenge. Our work explores the ability of current large language models (LLMs) to discern evidence in support or refute of specific hypotheses based on the text of scientific abstracts. We share a novel dataset for the task of scientific hypothesis evidencing using community-driven annotations of studies in the social sciences. We compare the performance of LLMs to several state-of-the-art benchmarks and highlight opportunities for future research in this area. The dataset is available at https://github.com/Sai90000/ScientificHypothesisEvidencing.git","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.06578v3","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2309.06578v3.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"can-large-language-models-discern-evidence","repo_url":"https://github.com/sai90000/scientifichypothesisevidencing","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"articles","task_name":"Articles"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}