arXiv:2506.16622cs.CLcs.AI2025-06

构建科学新闻公众感知模型,预测公众关注度与互动行为。

Modeling Public Perceptions of Science in Media

  • 基于12维感知框架,构建跨域科学新闻感知数据集。
  • 模型预测感知得分准确,且感知度直接影响评论与点赞数。
  • 适合科学传播者、媒体从业者及政策制定者参考使用。

有效吸引公众关注科学对建立科学信任至关重要。然而,在信息量持续增长的背景下,科学传播者难以预判受众对科学新闻的感知与互动方式。本文提出一种计算框架,可建模科学新闻在十二个维度(如新闻价值、重要性、意外性)上的公众感知。基于该框架,我们收集了来自美国和英国2,101名参与者的10,489条标注,形成大规模科学新闻感知数据集,揭示了公众对跨领域科学信息的反应特征。进一步开发了自然语言处理模型,能高效预测公众感知评分。利用该数据集与模型,从两个角度分析公众感知:(1)感知作为结果:哪些因素影响公众对科学信息的看法?(2)感知作为预测:能否用估计的感知值预测公众参与度?研究发现,科学新闻阅读频率是感知的主要驱动因素,而人口统计学特征影响甚微。更重要的是,通过大规模分析和在Reddit上设计的自然实验,证明估计的感知得分与最终互动模式直接相关:感知评分更高的帖子获得显著更多评论与点赞,这一规律在不同科学话题及相同科学内容但不同表述下均成立。整体表明,精细的感知建模对科学传播具有重要意义,为预测公众兴趣与参与提供新路径。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Effectively engaging the public with science is vital for fostering trust and understanding in our scientific community. Yet, with an ever-growing volume of information, science communicators struggle to anticipate how audiences will perceive and interact with scientific news. In this paper, we introduce a computational framework that models public perception across twelve dimensions, such as newsworthiness, importance, and surprisingness. Using this framework, we create a large-scale science news perception dataset with 10,489 annotations from 2,101 participants from diverse US and UK populations, providing valuable insights into public responses to scientific information across domains. We further develop NLP models that predict public perception scores with a strong performance. Leveraging the dataset and model, we examine public perception of science from two perspectives: (1) Perception as an outcome: What factors affect the public perception of scientific information? (2) Perception as a predictor: Can we use the estimated perceptions to predict public engagement with science? We find that individuals' frequency of science news consumption is the driver of perception, whereas demographic factors exert minimal influence. More importantly, through a large-scale analysis and carefully designed natural experiment on Reddit, we demonstrate that the estimated public perception of scientific information has direct connections with the final engagement pattern. Posts with more positive perception scores receive significantly more comments and upvotes, which is consistent across different scientific information and for the same science, but are framed differently. Overall, this research underscores the importance of nuanced perception modeling in science communication, offering new pathways to predict public interest and engagement with scientific content.

科学传播感知建模自然语言处理公众参与

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