Accelerating materials discovery for polymer solar cells: Data-driven insights enabled by natural language processing

We present a simulation of various active learning strategies for the discovery of polymer solar cell donor/acceptor pairs using data extracted from the literature spanning ~20 years by a natural language processing pipeline. While data-driven methods have been well established to discover novel materials faster than Edisonian trial-and-error approaches, their benefits have not been quantified for material discovery problems that can take decades. Our approach demonstrates a potential reduction in discovery time by approximately 75 %, equivalent to a 15 year acceleration in material innovation. Our pipeline enables us to extract data from greater than 3300 papers which is ~5 times larger and therefore more diverse than similar data sets reported by others. We also trained machine learning models to predict the power conversion efficiency and used our model to identify promising donor-acceptor combinations that are as yet unreported. We thus demonstrate a pipeline that goes from published literature to extracted material property data which in turn is used to obtain data-driven insights. Our insights include active learning strategies that can be used to train strong predictive models of material properties or be robust to the initial material system used. This work provides a valuable framework for data-driven research in materials science.