SAGE: Schema-Guided LLMs for Grant Review

Abstract:Grant reviewers must apply detailed criteria to application forms, budgets, and supporting documents while producing assessments that colleagues can inspect. We present SAGE, Schema-Guided Aspect-Based Grant Evaluation, a system that translates a grant rubric into structured checks and links its judgements to evidence from the application package. We evaluate SAGE in two stages on 35 nonprofit grant applications. A post-factum comparison with 105 reviews from the original competition shows fair ordinal agreement (kappa = 0.29). The foundation then conducted a criterion-level re-review after inspecting SAGE, producing 202 assessments. In this assisted round, SAGE reached kappa = 0.58 and outperformed a one-prompt-per-criterion baseline (kappa = 0.33 on the common subset), with higher rank correlation and lower error. A claim-level audit further identifies confirmed, disputed, and unaddressed parts of the structured draft. SAGE operationalizes the review methodology by producing a detailed, evidence-linked, and auditable draft for expert correction.

Computation and Language (cs.CL)

arXiv:2609.20829 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2609.20829v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.20829 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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