How Beneficial Is Pretraining on a Narrow Domain-Specific Corpus for Information Extraction about Photocatalytic Water Splitting?

J Chem Inf Model. 2024 Apr 22;64(8):3205-3212. doi: 10.1021/acs.jcim.4c00063. Epub 2024 Mar 27.

Abstract

Language models trained on domain-specific corpora have been employed to increase the performance in specialized tasks. However, little previous work has been reported on how specific a "domain-specific" corpus should be. Here, we test a number of language models trained on varyingly specific corpora by employing them in the task of extracting information from photocatalytic water splitting. We find that more specific corpora can benefit performance on downstream tasks. Furthermore, PhotocatalysisBERT, a pretrained model from scratch on scientific papers on photocatalytic water splitting, demonstrates improved performance over previous work in associating the correct photocatalyst with the correct photocatalytic activity during information extraction, achieving a precision of 60.8(+11.5)% and a recall of 37.2(+4.5)%.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Catalysis
  • Photochemical Processes*
  • Water* / chemistry

Substances

  • Water