ActionIE: Action Extraction from Scientific Literature with Programming Languages

Extraction of experimental procedures from human language in scientific literature and patents into actionable sequences in robotics language holds immense significance in scientific domains. Such an action extraction task is particularly challenging given the intricate details and context-dependent nature of the instructions, especially in fields like chemistry where reproducibility is paramount. In this paper, we introduce ACTIONIE, a method that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to bridge this divide by converting actions written in natural language into executable Python code. This enables us to capture the entities of interest, and the relationship between each action, given the features of Programming Languages. Utilizing linguistic cues identified by frequent patterns, ActionIE provides an improved mechanism to discern entities of interest. While our method is broadly applicable, we exemplify its power in the domain of chemical literature, wherein we focus on extracting experimental procedures for chemical synthesis. The code generated by our method can be easily transformed into robotics language which is in high demand in scientific fields. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method. In addition, we propose a graph-based metric to more accurately reflect the precision of extraction. We also develop a dataset to address the scarcity of scientific literature occurred in existing datasets.