Language + Molecules

Carl Edwards, Qingyun Wang, Heng Ji


Abstract
Climate change, access to food and water, pandemics–the world faces an enormous number of problems in the coming decades on scales of complexity never-before-seen. To address these issues, development of scientific solutions which are scalable, flexible, and inexpensive are critical. Over the last couple years, considerable interest has arisen for applying natural language-driven solutions to these problems. Particularly, the chemistry field is posed to be substantially accelerated by language+molecule models. This tutorial is designed to provide an introduction to this area of research. It requires no knowledge outside mainstream NLP, and it will enable participants to begin exploring relevant research. By discussing cutting-edge work, we will highlight the key roles language can fill for 1) abstract, compositional control of generative models, 2) bridging different biochemical modalities, 3) planning experimental procedures, and 4) broadening access to computational approaches. Beyond this, language models have also seen considerable success when applied to proteins or molecule structures, which can be considered as ‘exotic’ languages, and computational linguistics researchers’ expertise can be highly valuable for these impactful, possibly life-saving tasks.
Anthology ID:
2024.eacl-tutorials.3
Volume:
Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Tutorial Abstracts
Month:
March
Year:
2024
Address:
St. Julian’s, Malta
Editors:
Mohsen Mesgar, Sharid Loáiciga
Venue:
EACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
14–20
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.eacl-tutorials.3
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Carl Edwards, Qingyun Wang, and Heng Ji. 2024. Language + Molecules. In Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Tutorial Abstracts, pages 14–20, St. Julian’s, Malta. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Language + Molecules (Edwards et al., EACL 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.eacl-tutorials.3.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2024.eacl-tutorials.3.mp4