NLP for Chemistry: Introduction and Recent Advances

In this half-day tutorial we will be giving an introductory overview to a number of recent applications of natural language processing to a relatively underrepresented application domain: chemistry. Specifically, we will see how neural language models (transformers) can be applied (oftentimes with near-human performance) to chemical text mining, reaction extraction, or more importantly computational chemistry (forward and backward synthesis of chemical compounds). At the same time, a number of gold standards for experimentation have been made available to the research -academic and otherwise- community. Theoretical results will be, whenever possible, supported by system demonstrations in the form of Jupyter notebooks. This tutorial targets an audience interested in bioinformatics and biomedical applications, but pre-supposes no advanced knowledge of either.