New Frontiers of Scientific Text Mining: Tasks, Data, and Tools

Exploring the vast amount of rapidly growing scientific text data is highly beneficial for real-world scientific discovery. However, scientific text mining is particularly challenging due to the lack of specialized domain knowledge in natural language context, complex sentence structures in scientific writing, and multi-modal representations of scientific knowledge. This tutorial presents a comprehensive overview of recent research and development on scientific text mining, focusing on the biomedical and chemistry domains. First, we introduce the motivation and unique challenges of scientific text mining. Then we discuss a set of methods that perform effective scientific information extraction, such as named entity recognition, relation extraction, and event extraction. We also introduce real-world applications such as textual evidence retrieval, scientific topic contrasting for drug discovery, and molecule representation learning for reaction prediction. Finally, we conclude our tutorial by demonstrating, on real-world datasets (COVID-19 and organic chemistry literature), how the information can be extracted and retrieved, and how they can assist further scientific discovery. We also discuss the emerging research problems and future directions for scientific text mining.