VARAT: Variable Annotation Tool for Documents on Manufacturing Processes

Abstract

Physical model building is essential for realizing digital twins in the manufacturing industry and requires much toil. We aim to develop automated physical model builder (AutoPMoB) that can automatically build physical models from literature databases. AutoPMoB requires several fundamental technologies, and domain-specific datasets play a vital role in developing such technologies. Although datasets related to variables have been created, there has been no dataset in the chemical engineering domain. To create such a dataset, in this study, we developed an algorithm for extracting variable symbols from documents and a variable annotation tool, VARAT, based on the algorithm. We used the tool and created a dataset containing about 1,733 variable symbols from 45 papers on physical models of five manufacturing processes. VARAT enables us to quickly and accurately extract the variable symbols from documents and reduces the time for annotation per paper to less than half, which streamlines the annotation process.