Improving Information Access for Scientific Documents

Scientific knowledge is only meaningful if people can access, understand, and make use of it. Although open access has removed paywalls for many scientific papers, many barriers remain. Emerging AI technologies create new opportunities to study these challenges at scale and develop tools that improve access, but these transformations also introduce risks around information fidelity and the communication of uncertainty. In this talk, Lucy Lu Wang discusses work done on improving access to scientific and health information. She also discusses how machine-learning-based solutions can help identify accessibility failures and support the conversion of PDFs into more accessible formats. She connects this work to broader evaluation challenges for LLMs in scientific and consumer health information access.