DiSCoMaT: Distantly Supervised Composition Extraction from Tables in Materials Science Articles

Tanishq Gupta, Mohd Zaki, Devanshi Khatsuriya, Kausik Hira, N M Anoop Krishnan, Mausam


Abstract
A crucial component in the curation of KB for a scientific domain (e.g., materials science, food & nutrition, fuels) is information extraction from tables in the domain’s published research articles. To facilitate research in this direction, we define a novel NLP task of extracting compositions of materials (e.g., glasses) from tables in materials science papers. The task involves solving several challenges in concert, such as tables that mention compositions have highly varying structures; text in captions and full paper needs to be incorporated along with data in tables; and regular languages for numbers, chemical compounds, and composition expressions must be integrated into the model. We release a training dataset comprising 4,408 distantly supervised tables, along with 1,475 manually annotated dev and test tables. We also present DiSCoMaT, a strong baseline that combines multiple graph neural networks with several task-specific regular expressions, features, and constraints. We show that DiSCoMaT outperforms recent table processing architectures by significant margins. We release our code and data for further research on this challenging IE task from scientific tables.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.753
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
13465–13483
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.753
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.753
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Tanishq Gupta, Mohd Zaki, Devanshi Khatsuriya, Kausik Hira, N M Anoop Krishnan, and Mausam. 2023. DiSCoMaT: Distantly Supervised Composition Extraction from Tables in Materials Science Articles. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 13465–13483, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
DiSCoMaT: Distantly Supervised Composition Extraction from Tables in Materials Science Articles (Gupta et al., ACL 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.753.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.753.mp4