Named Entity Recognition and Normalization Applied to Large-Scale Information Extraction from the Materials Science Literature

Over the past decades, the number of published materials science articles has increased manyfold. Now, a major bottleneck in the materials discovery pipeline arises in connecting new results with the previously established literature. A potential solution to this problem is to map the unstructured raw-text of published articles onto a structured database entry that allows for programmatic querying. To this end, we apply text-mining with named entity recognition (NER), along with entity normalization, for large-scale information extraction from the published materials science literature. The NER is based on supervised machine learning with a recurrent neural network architecture, and the model is trained to extract summary-level information from materials science documents, including: inorganic material mentions, sample descriptors, phase labels, material properties and applications, as well as any synthesis and characterization methods used. Our classifer, with an overall accuracy (f1) of 87% on a test set, is applied to information extraction from 3.27 million materials science abstracts - the most information-dense section of published articles.

Overall, we extract more than 80 million materials-science-related named entities, and the content of each abstract is represented as a database entry in a structured format. Our database shows far greater recall in document retrieval when compared to traditional text-based searches due to an entity normalization procedure that recognizes synonyms. We demonstrate that simple database queries can be used to answer complex \meta-questions" of the published literature that would have previously required laborious, manual literature searches to answer. All of our data has been made freely available for bulk download; we have also made a public facing application programming interface (https://github.com/materialsintelligence/matscholar) and website http://matscholar.herokuapp.com/search for easy interfacing with the data, trained models and functionality described in this paper. These results will allow researchers to access targeted information on a scale and with a speed that has not been previously available, and can be expected to accelerate the pace of future materials science discovery.