Sparks: Inspiration for Science Writing using Language Models

10/14/2021
by   Katy Ilonka Gero, et al.
0

Large-scale language models are rapidly improving, performing well on a wide variety of tasks with little to no customization. In this work we investigate how language models can support science writing, a challenging writing task that is both open-ended and highly constrained. We present a system for generating "sparks", sentences related to a scientific concept intended to inspire writers. We find that our sparks are more coherent and diverse than a competitive language model baseline, and approach a human-created gold standard. In a study with 13 PhD students writing on topics of their own selection, we find three main use cases of sparks: aiding with crafting detailed sentences, providing interesting angles to engage readers, and demonstrating common reader perspectives. We also report on the various reasons sparks were considered unhelpful, and discuss how we might improve language models as writing support tools.

READ FULL TEXT

page 1

page 9

page 16

research
04/21/2023

The Role of AI in Human-AI Creative Writing for Hong Kong Secondary Students

The recent advancement in Natural Language Processing (NLP) capability h...
research
06/19/2023

Fine-Tuning Language Models for Scientific Writing Support

We support scientific writers in determining whether a written sentence ...
research
11/03/2022

LMentry: A Language Model Benchmark of Elementary Language Tasks

As the performance of large language models rapidly improves, benchmarks...
research
09/29/2022

Co-Writing Screenplays and Theatre Scripts with Language Models: An Evaluation by Industry Professionals

Language models are increasingly attracting interest from writers. Howev...
research
05/20/2023

Tweetorial Hooks: Generative AI Tools to Motivate Science on Social Media

Communicating science and technology is essential for the public to unde...
research
07/31/2023

Generative Models as a Complex Systems Science: How can we make sense of large language model behavior?

Coaxing out desired behavior from pretrained models, while avoiding unde...
research
08/24/2022

PEER: A Collaborative Language Model

Textual content is often the output of a collaborative writing process: ...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset