Performance of chemical structure string representations for chemical image recognition using transformers

20 September 2021, Version 1
This content is a preprint and has not undergone peer review at the time of posting.

Abstract

The use of molecular string representations for deep learning in chemistry has been steadily increasing in recent years. The complexity of existing string representations, and the difficulty in creating meaningful tokens from them, lead to the development of new string representations for chemical structures. In this study, the translation of chemical structure depictions in the form of bitmap images to corresponding molecular string representations was examined. An analysis of the recently developed DeepSMILES and SELFIES representations in comparison with the most commonly used SMILES representation is presented where the ability to translate image features into string representations with transformer models was specifically tested. The SMILES representation exhibits the best overall performance whereas SELFIES guarantee valid chemical structures. DeepSMILES performs in between SMILES and SELFIES, InChIs are not appropriate for the learning task. All investigations were carried out with publicly available datasets and the code used to train and evaluate the models has been made available to the public.

Keywords

Chemical data extraction
Deep learning
Neural networks
SMILES
SELFIES
DeepSMILES
chemical string representations

Supplementary weblinks

Comments

Comments are not moderated before they are posted, but they can be removed by the site moderators if they are found to be in contravention of our Commenting Policy [opens in a new tab] - please read this policy before you post. Comments should be used for scholarly discussion of the content in question. You can find more information about how to use the commenting feature here [opens in a new tab] .
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy [opens in a new tab] and Terms of Service [opens in a new tab] apply.