SAGE: Schema-Guided LLMs for Grant Review
TL;DR
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 is presented.
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.
