Incorporating Domain Knowledge into Materials Tokenization
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Abstract (arXiv)
While language models are increasingly utilized in materials science, typical models rely on frequency-centric tokenization methods originally developed for natural language processing. However, these methods frequently produce excessive fragmentation and semantic loss, failing to maintain the structural and semantic integrity of material concepts. To address this issue, we propose MATTER, a novel tokenization approach that integrates material knowledge into tokenization. Based on MatDetector trained on our materials knowledge base and a re-ranking method prioritizing material concepts in token merging, MATTER maintains the structural integrity of identified material concepts and prevents fragmentation during tokenization, ensuring their semantic meaning remains intact. The experimental results demonstrate that MATTER outperforms existing tokenization methods, achieving an average performance gain of 4% and 2% in the generation and classification tasks, respectively. These results underscore the importance of domain knowledge for tokenization strategies in scientific text processing. Our code is available at https://github.com/yerimoh/MATTER
Key facts. Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 22 of its 54 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 9 Jun 2025.
Builds on
22 of 54 references.
References · 22
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- 2023MatSci-NLP: Evaluating Scientific Language Models on Materials Science Language Tasks Using Text-to-Schema Modelingcited by 35
- 2020The SOFC-Exp Corpus and Neural Approaches to Information Extraction in the Materials Science Domaincited by 32
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Citing papers per year: 2026: 2.
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- 2025MatterChat: A Multi-Modal LLM for Material Science
- 2023MaScQA: A Question Answering Dataset for Investigating Materials Science Knowledge of Large Language Models
- 2024HoneyComb: A Flexible LLM-Based Agent System for Materials Science
- 2024Foundational Large Language Models for Materials Research