Deep neural networks and huge language models are becoming omnipresent in natural language applications. As they are known for requiring large amounts of training data, there is a growing body of work to improve the performance in low-resource settings. Motivated by the recent fundamental changes towards neural models and the popular pre-train and fine-tune paradigm, we survey promising approaches for low-resource natural language processing. After a discussion about the different dimensions of data availability, we give a structured overview of methods that enable learning when training data is sparse. This includes mechanisms to create additional labeled data like data augmentation and distant supervision as well as transfer learning settings that reduce the need for target supervision. A goal of our survey is to explain how these methods differ in their requirements as understanding them is essential for choosing a technique suited for a specific low-resource setting. Further key aspects of this work are to highlight open issues and to outline promising directions for future research.

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A Survey on Recent Approaches for Natural Language Processing in Low-Resource Scenarios.

Simple yet effective data augmentation techniques have been proposed for sentence-level and sentence-pair natural language processing tasks. Inspired by these efforts, we design and compare data augmentation for named entity recognition, which is usually modeled as a token-level sequence labeling problem. Through experiments on two data sets from the biomedical and materials science domains (i2b2-2010 and MaSciP), we show that simple augmentation can boost performance for both recurrent and transformer-based models, especially for small training sets.

An Analysis of Simple Data Augmentation for Named Entity Recognition

Given the emergence of data science and machine learning throughout all aspects of society, but particularly in the scientific domain, there is increased importance placed on obtaining data. Data in materials science are particularly heterogeneous, based on the significant range in materials classes that are explored and the variety of materials properties that are of interest. This leads to data that range many orders of magnitude, and these data may manifest as numerical text or image-based information, which requires quantitative interpretation. The ability to automatically consume and codify the scientific literature across domains—enabled by techniques adapted from the field of natural language processing—therefore has immense potential to unlock and generate the rich datasets necessary for data science and machine learning. This review focuses on the progress and practices of natural language processing and text mining of materials science literature and highlights opportunities for extracting additional information beyond text contained in figures and tables in articles. We discuss and provide examples for several reasons for the pursuit of natural language processing for materials, including data compilation, hypothesis development, and understanding the trends within and across fields. Current and emerging natural language processing methods along with their applications to materials science are detailed. We, then, discuss natural language processing and data challenges within the materials science domain where future directions may prove valuable.

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Data-driven materials research enabled by natural language processing and information extraction

https://escholarship.org/content/qt1mk883j5/qt1mk883j5.pdf?t=qpzz3k

Opportunities and challenges of text mining in aterials research.

http://www.cell.com/article/S2666389922000733/pdf

Quantifying the advantage of domain-specific pre-training on named entity recognition tasks in materials science

This paper presents a new challenging information extraction task in the domain of materials science. We develop an annotation scheme for marking information on experiments related to solid oxide fuel cells in scientific publications, such as involved materials and measurement conditions. With this paper, we publish our annotation guidelines, as well as our SOFC-Exp corpus consisting of 45 open-access scholarly articles annotated by domain experts. A corpus and an inter-annotator agreement study demonstrate the complexity of the suggested named entity recognition and slot filling tasks as well as high annotation quality. We also present strong neural-network based models for a variety of tasks that can be addressed on the basis of our new data set. On all tasks, using BERT embeddings leads to large performance gains, but with increasing task complexity, adding a recurrent neural network on top seems beneficial. Our models will serve as competitive baselines in future work, and analysis of their performance highlights difficult cases when modeling the data and suggests promising research directions.

/pdf/the-sofc-exp-corpus-and-neural-approaches-to-information-48n9ag3xxs.pdf

Renou Benteau

Papers

The SOFC-Exp Corpus and Neural Approaches to Information Extraction in the Materials Science Domain

The SOFC-Exp Corpus and Neural Approaches to Information Extraction in the Materials Science Domain