Hands-on sessions / Hands-on session 2 /

Upload and chat about a document

One use case of LLMs that has become popular is providing a document (for example, a PDF file) and chatting with LLMs about the content. An alternative that will work with some of the LLM tools is providing a link to the document instead of uploading it.

Document upload

If you have access to Microsoft Copilot via your university then you can simply use the upload function in the chat to upload a PDF file and then ask it to answer questions.

There is a number of free alternatives that you can find online. One of those is https://www.chatpdf.com/. You simply upload your PDF document here and start asking questions. One nice feature of this tool is that it tells you where it found the answer to your question.

☝️ TIP: You can upload a document in Swedish but ask questions in English and vice versa because the LLM can just translate between them.

☝️ TIP: If you run into a file size limitation on Microsoft Copilot, try the free alternative https://chatpdf.com/.

Example documents

In order to test this out you can use your own document or download one of our suggestions:

• SciLifeLab Roadmap for 2020-2030;
• SciLifeLab annual report 2023;
• Antibiotic perseverance increases the risk of resistance development (Brandis, Larsson, Elf, PNAS 2023).

Asking for information from the document

For example, we can upload the SciLifeLab annual report 2023 and ask the following.

What was the total budget of SciLifeLab in 2023?

Create an executive summary

Suggest improvements

Reviewing a paper

One use case is to ask to use LLMs as a tool to help review your texts.

Act as a tired, critical reviewer who looks for reasons to deduct points from a grant application. Read and criticize the following manuscript: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.03.01.24303566v1 

Summarizing documents

Summarize the article at https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1011323

List three shortcomings of the paper

Finding articles

In our experience these prompts work particularly well in Microsoft Copilot and Perplexity.

Give me one reference to a scientific paper that supports the hypothesis that imatinib is useful for treating diabetes, and another reference that it is not useful for diabetes

Redo but only clinical studies