OpticalBERT and OpticalTable-SQA: Text- and Table-Based Language Models for the Optical-Materials Domain

Text mining in the optical-materials domain is becoming increasingly important as the number of scientific publications in this area grows rapidly. Language models such as Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) have opened up a new era and brought a significant boost to state-of-the-art natural-language-processing (NLP) tasks. In this paper, we present two "materials-aware" text-based language models for optical research, OpticalBERT and OpticalPureBERT, which are trained on a large corpus of scientific literature in the optical-materials domain. These two models outperform BERT and previous state-of-the-art models in a variety of text-mining tasks about optical materials. We also release the first "materials-aware" table-based language model, OpticalTable-SQA. This is a querying facility that solicits answers to questions about optical materials using tabular information that pertains to this scientific domain. The OpticalTable-SQA model was realized by fine-tuning the Tapas-SQA model using a manually annotated OpticalTableQA data set which was curated specifically for this work. While preserving its sequential question-answering performance on general tables, the OpticalTable-SQA model significantly outperforms Tapas-SQA on optical-materials-related tables. All models and data sets are available to the optical-materials-science community.