Auto-generating question-answering datasets with domain-specific knowledge for language models in scientific tasks†

Large language models (LLMs) have emerged as a useful tool for the public to process and respond to a vast range of interactive text-based queries. While foundational LLMs are well suited to making general user queries, smaller language models that have been trained on custom text from a specific domain of interest tend to display superior performance on queries about that domain, can operate faster and improve efficiency. Nonetheless, considerable resources are still needed to pre-train a language model with custom data. We present a pipeline that shows a way to overcome this need for pre-training. The pipeline first uses new algorithms that we have designed to produce a large, high-quality question-answering dataset (SCQA) for a particular domain of interest, solar cells. These algorithms employed a solar-cell database that had been auto-generated using the ‘chemistry-aware’ natural language processing tool, ChemDataExtractor. In turn, this SCQA dataset is used to fine-tune language models, whose resulting F₁-scores of performance far exceed (by 10–20%) those of analogous language models that have been fine-tuned against a general-English language QA dataset, SQuAD. Importantly, the performance of the language models fine-tuned against the SCQA dataset does not depend on the size of their architecture, whether or not the tokens were cased or uncased or whether or not the foundational language models were further pre-trained with domain-specific data or fine-tuned directly from their vanilla state. This shows that this domain-specific SCQA dataset produced by our algorithms has sufficient intrinsic domain knowledge to be directly fine-tuned against a foundational language model for immediate use with improved performance.