Text2Mol: Cross-Modal Molecule Retrieval with Natural Language Queries

Carl Edwards, ChengXiang Zhai, Heng Ji


Abstract
We propose a new task, Text2Mol, to retrieve molecules using natural language descriptions as queries. Natural language and molecules encode information in very different ways, which leads to the exciting but challenging problem of integrating these two very different modalities. Although some work has been done on text-based retrieval and structure-based retrieval, this new task requires integrating molecules and natural language more directly. Moreover, this can be viewed as an especially challenging cross-lingual retrieval problem by considering the molecules as a language with a very unique grammar. We construct a paired dataset of molecules and their corresponding text descriptions, which we use to learn an aligned common semantic embedding space for retrieval. We extend this to create a cross-modal attention-based model for explainability and reranking by interpreting the attentions as association rules. We also employ an ensemble approach to integrate our different architectures, which significantly improves results from 0.372 to 0.499 MRR. This new multimodal approach opens a new perspective on solving problems in chemistry literature understanding and molecular machine learning.
Anthology ID:
2021.emnlp-main.47
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
595–607
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.47
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.47
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Carl Edwards, ChengXiang Zhai, and Heng Ji. 2021. Text2Mol: Cross-Modal Molecule Retrieval with Natural Language Queries. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 595–607, Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Text2Mol: Cross-Modal Molecule Retrieval with Natural Language Queries (Edwards et al., EMNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.47.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.47.mp4
Code
 cnedwards/text2mol
Data
ChEBI-20