Natural Language Analysis of Plasma Catalysis Literature

One of the major challenges in following and searching the scientific literature is that very often, especially in nascent fields, terminology is not well defined, so that the same term may be used to mean different things, or multiple terms are used to describe the same thing. Such is the case in the nascent field of "plasma catalysis," an approach to chemical reactions pioneered at Notre Dame. A recent paper (http://doi.org/10.1109/TRPMS.2024.3447551) describes the creation of a natural language model to analyze literature in a related field. The goal of this project is to replicate the work described in this paper, but applied to the plasma catalysis problem.

Name of research group, project, or lab
Schneider group
Why join this research group or lab?

The Schneider group is highly adept at creating molecular-scale models of chemical reactions, taking advantage of fundamental principles from chemistry and physics. Approximately half of the group develop models to understand the potential for chemical processes to be improved by marrying to a low-temperature plasma. That work is carried out in collaboration with Profs. Jason Hicks, David Go, and their research groups.

Logistics Information:
Project categories
Computer Science & Engineering
Student ranks applicable
Junior
Senior
Graduate Student
Student qualifications

Prof Schneider has zero (!) expertise in natural language processing. This opportunity is for a student or student who is already skilled in this area or has the ability and motivation to self-learn the needed tools. 

Hours per week
3 credits / 12+ hours
Summer - Full Time
Compensation
Research for Credit
Paid - General
Number of openings
2
Techniques learned

Those techniques are well laid out in http://doi.org/10.1109/TRPMS.2024.3447551. 

Project start
Fall 2025
Contact Information:
Mentor
wschnei1@nd.edu
Professor
Name of project director or principal investigator
Bill Schneider
Email address of project director or principal investigator
wschneider@nd.edu
2 sp. | 0 appl.
Hours per week
3 credits / 12+ hours (+1)
3 credits / 12+ hoursSummer - Full Time
Project categories
Computer Science & Engineering