How Well Do Large Language Models Understand Tables in Materials Science?

Advances in materials science require leveraging past findings and data from the vast published literature. While some materials data repositories are being built, they typically rely on newly created data in narrow domains because extracting detailed data and metadata from the enormous wealth of publications is immensely challenging. The advent of large language models (LLMs) presents a new opportunity to rapidly and accurately extract data and insights from the published literature and transform it into structured data formats for easy query and reuse. In this paper, we build on initial strategies for using LLMs for rapid and autonomous data extraction from materials science articles in a format curatable by materials databases. We presented the subdomain of polymer composites as our example use case and demonstrated the success and challenges of LLMs on extracting tabular data. We explored different table representations for use with LLMs, finding that a multimodal model with an image input yielded the most promising results. This model achieved an accuracy score of 0.910 for composition information extraction and an F\(_1\) score of 0.863 for property name information extraction. With the most conservative evaluation for the property extraction requiring exact match in all the details, we obtained an F\(_1\) score of 0.419. We observed that by allowing varying degrees of flexibility in the evaluation, the score can increase to 0.769. We envision that the results and analysis from this study will promote further research directions in developing information extraction strategies from materials information sources.