Natural language processing for knowledge discovery and information extraction from energetics corpora

• Published in: Propellants, explosives, pyrotechnics Vol. 48; no. 11
• Main Authors: VanGessel, Francis G., Perry, Efrem, Mohan, Salil, Barham, Oliver M., Cavolowsky, Mark
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Weinheim Wiley Subscription Services, Inc 01.11.2023
• Subjects: Algorithms; Classification; Dirichlet problem; Energetic materials; Information retrieval; Knowledge discovery; Natural language processing; Transformers
• ISSN: 0721-3115; 1521-4087
• DOI: 10.1002/prep.202300109

We present a demonstration of the utility of Natural Language Processing (NLP) for aiding research into energetic materials and associated systems. The NLP method enables machine understanding of textual data, offering an automated route to knowledge discovery and information extraction from energetics text. We apply three established unsupervised NLP models: Latent Dirichlet Allocation, Word2Vec, and the Transformer to a large curated dataset of energetics‐related scientific articles. We demonstrate that each NLP algorithm is capable of identifying energetic topics and concepts, generating a language model which aligns with Subject Matter Expert knowledge. Furthermore, we present a document classification pipeline for energetics text. Our classification pipeline achieves 59–76 % accuracy depending on the NLP model used, with the highest performing Transformer model rivaling inter‐annotator agreement metrics. The NLP approaches studied in this work can identify concepts germane to energetics and therefore hold promise as a tool for accelerating energetics research efforts and energetics material development.