Large language models (LLMs) trained on general domain corpora showed remarkable results on natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, previous research demonstrated LLMs trained using domain-focused corpora perform better on specialized tasks. Inspired by this insight, we developed INDUS, a comprehensive suite of LLMs tailored for the closely-related domains of Earth science, biology, physics, heliophysics, planetary sciences and astrophysics, and trained using curated scientific corpora drawn from diverse data sources. The suite of models include: (1) an encoder model trained using domain-specific vocabulary and corpora to address NLP tasks, (2) a contrastive-learning based text embedding model trained using a diverse set of datasets to address information retrieval tasks and (3) smaller versions of these models created using knowledge distillation for applications which have latency or resource constraints. We also created three new scientific benchmark datasets, Climate-Change NER (entity-recognition), NASA-QA (extractive QA) and NASA-IR (IR) to accelerate research in these multi-disciplinary fields. We show that our models outperform both general-purpose (RoBERTa) and domain- specific (SciBERT) encoders on these new tasks as well as existing tasks in the domains of interest. Furthermore, we demonstrate the use of these models in two industrial settings- as a retrieval model for large-scale vector search applications and in automatic content tagging systems.

In this article, we describe the overview of our shared task: Detecting Entities in the Astrophysics Literature (DEAL). The DEAL shared task was part of the Workshop on Information Extraction from Scientific Publications (WIESP) in AACL-IJCNLP 2022. Information extraction from scientific publications is critical in several downstream tasks such as identification of critical entities, article summarization, citation classification, etc. The motivation of this shared task was to develop a community-wide effort for entity extraction from astrophysics literature. Automated entity extraction would help to build knowledge bases, high-quality meta-data for indexing and search, and several other use-cases of interests. Thirty-three teams registered for DEAL, twelve of them participated in the system runs, and finally four teams submitted their system descriptions. We analyze their system and performance and finally discuss the findings of DEAL.