SLIDERS: Systematic Reviews via Automated Evidence Synthesis and Reconciliation
About
Systematic reviews -- which requires comprehensive evidence collection and synthesis from large document corpora in response to targeted research questions -- are foundational in finance, social sciences, and other technical fields. Manual construction of evidence tables is labor-intensive, and recent LLM-based assistants relying on embedding or keyword based search often fail to meet the coverage standards of systematic reviews. We introduce SLIDERS, a novel LLM-based methodology for systematic reviews, by automatically assembling evidence tables tailored to research questions. In addition to extracting structured data from documents, SLIDERS can extract full-text excerpts that serve as direct evidence or as provenance for structured data. Core to SLIDERS is an automated evidence reconciliation agent that writes code to analyze and reconcile extracted evidence, bringing together information fragmented across documents, resolving inconsistencies across excerpts, and synthesizing overlapping findings into a coherent evidence table. In addition, SLIDERS allows users to ask follow-up questions in natural language to further explore the assembled evidence. We evaluate SLIDERS on three systematic-review-style tasks over large document collections. SLIDERS outperforms the best-performing baseline across benchmarks, remains near 90% accuracy across 6M-11M-token corpora. On two new follow-up analysis benchmarks SLIDERS can answer 77.9% and 58.3% followup questions accurately