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The number of published manufacturing science digital articles available from scientifc journals and the broader web have exponentially increased every year since the 1990s. To assimilate all of this knowledge by a novice engineer or an experienced researcher, requires signifcant synthesis of the existing knowledge space contained within published material, to fnd answers to basic and complex queries. Algorithmic approaches through machine learning and specifcally Natural Language Processing (NLP) on a domain specifc area such as manufacturing, is lacking. One of the signifcant challenges to analyzing manufacturing vocabulary is the lack of a named entity recognition model that enables algorithms to classify the manufacturing corpus of words under various manufacturing semantic categories. This work presents a supervised machine learning approach to categorize unstructured text from 500K+manufacturing science related scientifc abstracts and labelling them under various manufacturing topic categories. A neural network model using a bidirectional long-short term memory, plus a conditional random feld (BiLSTM+CRF) is trained to extract information from manufacturing science abstracts. Our classifer achieves an overall accuracy (f1-score) of 88%, which is quite near to the state-of-the-art performance. Two use case examples are presented that demonstrate the value of the developed NER model as a Technical Language Processing (TLP) workfow on manufacturing science documents. The long term goal is to extract valuable knowledge regarding the connections and relationships between key manufacturing concepts/entities available within millions of manufacturing documents into a structured labeled-property graph data structure that allow for programmatic query and retrieval. 

Abstract Flare frequency distributions represent a key approach to addressing one of the largest problems in solar and stellar physics: determining the mechanism that counterintuitively heats coronae to temperatures that are orders of magnitude hotter than the corresponding photospheres. It is widely accepted that the magnetic field is responsible for the heating, but there are two competing mechanisms that could explain it: nanoflares or Alfvén waves. To date, neither can be directly observed. Nanoflares are, by definition, extremely small, but their aggregate energy release could represent a substantial heating mechanism, presuming they are sufficiently abundant. One way to test this presumption is via the flare frequency distribution, which describes how often flares of various energies occur. If the slope of the power law fitting the flare frequency distribution is above a critical threshold,α= 2 as established in prior literature, then there should be a sufficient abundance of nanoflares to explain coronal heating. We performed >600 case studies of solar flares, made possible by an unprecedented number of data analysts via three semesters of an undergraduate physics laboratory course. This allowed us to include two crucial, but nontrivial, analysis methods: preflare baseline subtraction and computation of the flare energy, which requires determining flare start and stop times. We aggregated the results of these analyses into a statistical study to determine thatα= 1.63 ± 0.03. This is below the critical threshold, suggesting that Alfvén waves are an important driver of coronal heating.