Unlocking the Potential: Benchmarking Large Language Models in Water Engineering and Research

Understand

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have sparked interest in their potential applications across various fields.

• This paper embarked on a pivotal inquiry: Can existing LLMs effectively serve as "water expert models" for water engineering and research tasks? This study was the first to evaluate LLMs' contributions across various water engineering and research tasks by establishing a domain-specific benchmark suite, namely, WaterER.
• Herein, we prepared 983 tasks related to water engineering and research, categorized into "wastewater treatment", "environmental restoration", "drinking water treatment and distribution", "sanitation", "anaerobic digestion" and "contaminants assessment".
• We evaluated the performance of seven LLMs (i.e., GPT-4, GPT-3.5, Gemini, GLM-4, ERNIE, QWEN and Llama3) on these tasks.