Extracting Accurate Materials Data from Research Papers with Conversational Language Models and Prompt Engineering -- Example of ChatGPT

Abstract: There has been a growing effort to replace hand extraction of data from research papers with automated data extraction based on natural language processing (NLP), language models (LMs), and recently, large language models (LLMs). Although these methods enable efficient extraction of data from large sets of research papers, they require a significant amount of up-front effort, expertise, and coding. In this work we propose the ChatExtract method that can fully automate very accurate data extraction with essentially no initial effort or background using an advanced conversational LLM (or AI). ChatExtract consists of a set of engineered prompts applied to a conversational LLM that both identify sentences with data, extract data, and assure its correctness through a series of follow-up questions. These follow-up questions address a critical challenge associated with LLMs - their tendency to provide factually inaccurate responses. ChatExtract can be applied with any conversational LLMs and yields very high quality data extraction. In tests on materials data we find precision and recall both over 90% from the best conversational LLMs, likely rivaling or exceeding human accuracy in many cases. We demonstrate that the exceptional performance is enabled by the information retention in a conversational model combined with purposeful redundancy and introducing uncertainty through follow-up prompts. These results suggest that approaches similar to ChatExtract, due to their simplicity, transferability and accuracy are likely to replace other methods of data extraction in the near future.