English grammar is far more complex than the languages spanned by any small set of regexes, so I suspect that you will not find the precise set you are looking for. There are some modules that look at coarse text structure, such as Text::Sentence which would be useful in preporcessing your data.

Your best bet is probably to study some example scientific prose that you are interested in and identify a small set of patterns that work for you. Then distill regexes to fit those and only those.

Most information retrieval algorithms focus on keywords and that may be good enough for your app; consider this option first. Keywords are much easier to parse than phrases or sentences. They are the simplest if you want to get something up and running quickly.

There is a branch of computational linguistics called text summarization and there is quite a bit of work in the machine intelligence community devoted to extracting essential content automatically from text. These programs are big, expensive and many man-years of work in the making.

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