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.
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.