RESEARCH PAPERS

Discovering Novel Research Problems Using Text Generation Technology Based on Large Language Model

  • Han Hongqi ,
  • Zhang Junsheng ,
  • Zhou Zexu ,
  • Wu Guang
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  • 1 Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China, Beijing 100038;
    2 Key Laboratory of Rich-Media Knowledge Organization and Service of Digital Publishing Content, NPPA (National Press and Publication Administration), Beijing 100038
Han Hongqi, Research Fellow, PhD, E-mail: bithhq@163.com; Zhang Junsheng, Research Fellow, PhD; Zhou Zexu, Master’s Candidate; Wu Guang, Master’s Candidate.

Received date: 2024-08-02

  Revised date: 2024-11-23

  Online published: 2025-08-20

Supported by

This work is supported by National Science and Technology Major Project, titled “Construction and Optimization of Pre-Trained Large Models for Highly Credible Scientific Literature” (Grant No. 2023ZD0121502) and the General Projects of ISTIC Innovation Foundation, titled “Problem Innovation Solution Mining Based on Text Generation Model” (Grant No. MS2024-03).

Abstract

[Purpose/Significance] Scientific research starts with problems, which drive and guide research. The novel scientific research problems generated by computers can stimulate the creative thinking and innovative inspiration of researchers, and assist them in proposing new scientific research problems. [Method/Process] Drawing on the method of the lexically constrained text generation based on segment predication (LCTG-SP), a research problem generation method based on a LLM was proposed, which could generate new research problems based on user input keywords. The generation process included five steps: problem sentence extraction, training data construction, large model fine-tuning, generated text processing, and research problem selection. [Result/Conclusion] The Qwen2-1.5B-Instruction model provided by TongyiQianwen is selected as the base LLM for experimental research, and four indicators including constrained keyword ratio, text similarity, text diversity, and text fluency are used to evaluate the effectiveness of generated text. The experiments find that the proposed method can generate understandable and novel scientific research problems. Compared with the Bart model, it finds that the text generated by the LLM (Qwen2) can well contain constrained keywords and perform outstandingly in terms of text diversity. By manually evaluating the generated scientific research problems and comparing them with the author’s newly proposed problems, it concludes that they have novelty and reference value, which can stimulate researchers’ creative thinking.

Cite this article

Han Hongqi , Zhang Junsheng , Zhou Zexu , Wu Guang . Discovering Novel Research Problems Using Text Generation Technology Based on Large Language Model[J]. Library and Information Service, 2025 , 69(17) : 72 -83 . DOI: 10.13266/j.issn.0252-3116.2025.17.007

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