LLMs as Science Journalists: Supporting Early-stage Researchers in Communicating Their Science to the Public
This addresses the need for better science communication tools for early-stage researchers, though it is incremental as it builds on existing LLM capabilities.
The paper tackles the problem of helping early-stage researchers communicate their science to the public by proposing a framework to train LLMs as science journalists, resulting in trained models that ask more relevant questions about societal impact and are preferred by participants over general-purpose LLMs.
The scientific community needs tools that help early-stage researchers effectively communicate their findings and innovations to the public. Although existing general-purpose Large Language Models (LLMs) can assist in this endeavor, they are not optimally aligned for it. To address this, we propose a framework for training LLMs to emulate the role of a science journalist that can be used by early-stage researchers to learn how to properly communicate their papers to the general public. We evaluate the usefulness of our trained LLM Journalists in leading conversations with both simulated and human researchers. %compared to the general-purpose ones. Our experiments indicate that LLMs trained using our framework ask more relevant questions that address the societal impact of research, prompting researchers to clarify and elaborate on their findings. In the user study, the majority of participants who interacted with our trained LLM Journalist appreciated it more than interacting with general-purpose LLMs.