A literature-guided descriptor-based framework for filtering composition search spaces

Scientific literature contains latent knowledge about materials behavior, but much of this knowledge is expressed through words, contexts, and recurring associations rather than explicit design principles. This raises a central question: how can large-scale scientific corpora be used for practical problems in materials discovery? Here, we present a literature-guided descriptor-based filtering framework for reducing composition search spaces. For a given performance metric, the framework selects two descriptors from a filtered vocabulary in a literature-trained word embedding model and uses the selected descriptors to construct a Pareto-based filter for candidate compositions. Across the evaluated performance metrics and composition search spaces, the framework filters out an average of 74.27% of the candidate compositions, with an average best-value error of 1.93% relative to experimental measurements. Compared with expert-chosen and random descriptors, our performance metric-dependent descriptors provide a more controlled balance between retained fraction and best-value error. These results show that literature-derived embeddings can support intuitive and reproducible filters for narrowing candidate composition spaces while preserving high-performing compositions.