Odor Descriptor Understanding through Prompting

Embeddings from contemporary natural language processing (NLP) models are commonly used as numerical representations for words or sentences. However, odor descriptor words, like "leather" or "fruity", vary significantly between their commonplace usage and their olfactory usage, as a result traditional methods for generating these embeddings do not suffice. In this paper, we present two methods to generate embeddings for odor words that are more closely aligned with their olfactory meanings when compared to off-the-shelf embeddings. These generated embeddings outperform the previous state-of-the-art and contemporary fine-tuning/prompting methods on a pre-existing zero-shot odor-specific NLP benchmark.