Poster
in
Workshop: Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning: Fostering the Maturity of ML Applications for Climate Change
Literature Mining with Large Language Models to Assist the Development of Sustainable Building Materials
Yifei Duan · Yixi Tian · Soumya Ghosh · Richard Goodwin · Vineeth Venugopal · Jeremy Gregory · Jie Chen · Elsa Olivetti
Concrete industry, as one of the significant sources of carbon emissions, drives the urgency for its decarbonization that requires a shift to alternative materials. However, the absence of systematic knowledge summary remains a challenge for further development of sustainable building materials. This work offers a cost-efficient strategy for information extraction tasks in complex terminology settings using small (2.8B) large language models (LLMs) with well-designed instruction-completion schemes and fine-tuning strategies, introducing a dataset cataloging civil engineering applications of alternative materials. The Multiple Choice instruction scheme significantly improves model accuracies in entity inference from non-Noun-Phrase sources, with supervised fine-tuning benefiting from straightforward tokenized representations of choices. We also demonstrate the utility of the dataset by extracting valuable insights into promising applications of alternative materials from knowledge graph representations.