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Call for Papers:
Language + Molecules @ ACL 2024 Workshop
- Time: August 15, 2024
- Location: Bangkok, Thailand
- Venue: ACL 2024
- Website: https://language-plus-molecules.github.io/
- Contact Email: language.molecules [at] gmail.com
- Twitter: @lang_plus_mols
- Submission Deadline: May 17, 2024
Workshop Overview:
Join us as we explore the integration of molecules and natural language, with exciting applications such as developing new drugs, materials, and chemical processes. These molecular solutions will be critical to address global problems on scales of complexity never-before-seen, in areas such as climate change and healthcare. However, they exist in extremely large search spaces, which makes AI tools a necessity. Excitingly, the chemistry field is posed to be substantially accelerated via multimodal models combining language with molecules and drug structures.
A natural question to ask is why we want to integrate natural language with molecules. Combining these types of information has the possibility to accelerate scientific discovery: imagine a future where a doctor can write a few sentences describing a patient’s symptoms and then receive the exact structure of the drugs necessary to treat that patient’s ailment (taking into account the patient’s genotype, phenotype, and medical history). This high-level control of molecules requires a method of abstract description, and humans have already developed one for communication: language.
Integrating language with scientific modalities has applications in:
- Generative Modeling: Discovering molecules with high-level functions, abstract properties, and composition of many properties.
- Bridging Modalities: Connecting different modalities of data (e.g., proteins, cellular pathways, small molecules)
- Domain Understanding: Grounding language models into external real world knowledge can improve understanding of unseen molecules and advance many emerging tasks.
- Automation: Instruction-following, dialogue-capable, and tool-equipped models can guide automated discovery in silico and in robotic labs.
- Democratization: Language enables scientists without computational expertise to leverage advances in scientific AI.
Research in scientific NLP, integrating molecules with natural language, and multimodal AI for science/medicine has experienced significant attention and growth in recent months. We believe now is the time to begin organizing this nascent community.
Submission Topics:
We welcome long (8 page) and short (4 page) paper submissions on all topics related to language + molecules and modeling molecules as language, including:
- Going beyond language to incorporate molecular structure and interactions into LLMs.
- Addressing data scarcity and inconsistency: new training methodologies and methods for extracting data from scientific literature.
- Language-enabled solutions for discovering new drugs and molecules.
- Incorporating domain knowledge from human-constructed databases into LLMs.
- Instruction-following, dialogue-capable, and tool-equipped LLMs for molecules.
- Sequence representations for molecular structures, including organic molecules, proteins, DNA, and inorganic crystals.
To encourage higher quality submissions, we will offer Best Paper Award(s) based on nomination by the reviewers and extensive discussions among the chairs. Accepted papers will be presented as posters by default, and outstanding submissions will also be selected for oral or spotlight presentations.
Shared task:
We will accept submissions to our shared task to benchmark the progress of generative text-molecule models. Shared task submissions will be encouraged to submit papers. The shared task will focus on abstraction, functionality, and composition. The dataset can be found at https://github.com/language-plus-molecules/LPM-24-Dataset .
Submission Instructions:
We welcome non-archival or archival submissions; archival submissions will be an opt-in process. All submissions should be in PDF format following the ACL template and made through OpenReview submission portal (https://openreview.net/group?id=aclweb.org/ACL/2024/Workshop/Language_an...)
Important Dates:
All deadlines are 11:59 pm UTC-12h (“Anywhere on Earth”).
- Submission Deadline May 17, 2024
- Decision Notifications June 22, 2024
- Camera-Ready Deadline July 5, 2024
- Workshop Date August 15, 2024
Organizers:
Carl Edwards, UIUC
Qingyun Wang, UIUC
Manling Li, Stanford/Northwestern
Lawrence Zhao, Yale
Tom Hope, AI2/HUJI
Heng Ji, UIUC