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The ever-increasing number of materials science articles makes it hard to infer chemistry-structure-property relations from published literature. We used natural language processing (NLP) methods to automatically extract material property data from the abstracts of polymer literature. As a component of our pipeline, we trained MaterialsBERT, a language model, using 2.4 million materials science abstracts, which outperforms other baseline models in three out of five named entity recognition datasets when used as the encoder for text. Using this pipeline, we obtained ~300,000 material property records from ~130,000 abstracts in 60 hours. The extracted data was analyzed for a diverse range of applications such as fuel cells, supercapacitors, and polymer solar cells to recover non-trivial insights. The data extracted through our pipeline is made available through a web platform at https://polymerscholar.org which can be used to locate material property data recorded in abstracts conveniently. This work demonstrates the feasibility of an automatic pipeline that starts from published literature and ends with a complete set of extracted material property information.

Modern data-driven tools are transforming application-specific polymer development cycles. Surrogate models that can be trained to predict the properties of new polymers are becoming commonplace. Nevertheless, these models do not utilize the full breadth of the knowledge available in datasets, which are oftentimes sparse; inherent correlations between different property datasets are disregarded. Here, we demonstrate the potency of multi-task learning approaches that exploit such inherent correlations effectively, particularly when some property dataset sizes are small. Data pertaining to 36 different properties of over $13, 000$ polymers (corresponding to over $23,000$ data points) are coalesced and supplied to deep-learning multi-task architectures. Compared to conventional single-task learning models (that are trained on individual property datasets independently), the multi-task approach is accurate, efficient, scalable, and amenable to transfer learning as more data on the same or different properties become available. Moreover, these models are interpretable. Chemical rules, that explain how certain features control trends in specific property values, emerge from the present work, paving the way for the rational design of application specific polymers meeting desired property or performance objectives.