Natural language processing and deep learning to be applied in chemical space

Chemist Dr Jiayun Pang, from Greenwich University, will work with Dr Ivan Vulić, an NLP and machine learning expert from Cambridge University, to study the latest developments in the field of NLP and to examine their further applicability in the chemical field.

NLP lies at the intersection between linguistics and computer science which aims to process and analyse human language, typically provided as written text.

NLP is now strongly focused on the use of machine learning to challenge tasks with revolutionary algorithms. They now underpins a wide range of real-life applications, such as ChatGPT, virtual assistants and automatic text completion.

This research will specifically explore how Transformer models, a deep learning algorithm developed by Google in 2017, can be adapted to solve research challenges in chemistry.

The researchers said that, whilst chemical structures are usually three dimensional, they are also often converted into Simplified Molecular Input Line Entry Systems (SMILES), a simple vocabulary of chemical elements and bond symbols with grammatical rules of how the chemical elements are positioned.