Graph-Based Retriever Captures the Long Tail of Biomedical Knowledge

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Delile, Julien, Mukherjee, Srayanta, Van Pamel, Anton, Zhukov, Leonid
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Delile, Julien
Mukherjee, Srayanta
Van Pamel, Anton
Zhukov, Leonid
author_facet Delile, Julien
Mukherjee, Srayanta
Van Pamel, Anton
Zhukov, Leonid
contents Large language models (LLMs) are transforming the way information is retrieved with vast amounts of knowledge being summarized and presented via natural language conversations. Yet, LLMs are prone to highlight the most frequently seen pieces of information from the training set and to neglect the rare ones. In the field of biomedical research, latest discoveries are key to academic and industrial actors and are obscured by the abundance of an ever-increasing literature corpus (the information overload problem). Surfacing new associations between biomedical entities, e.g., drugs, genes, diseases, with LLMs becomes a challenge of capturing the long-tail knowledge of the biomedical scientific production. To overcome this challenge, Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) has been proposed to alleviate some of the shortcomings of LLMs by augmenting the prompts with context retrieved from external datasets. RAG methods typically select the context via maximum similarity search over text embeddings. In this study, we show that RAG methods leave out a significant proportion of relevant information due to clusters of over-represented concepts in the biomedical literature. We introduce a novel information-retrieval method that leverages a knowledge graph to downsample these clusters and mitigate the information overload problem. Its retrieval performance is about twice better than embedding similarity alternatives on both precision and recall. Finally, we demonstrate that both embedding similarity and knowledge graph retrieval methods can be advantageously combined into a hybrid model that outperforms both, enabling potential improvements to biomedical question-answering models.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_12352
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Graph-Based Retriever Captures the Long Tail of Biomedical Knowledge
Delile, Julien
Mukherjee, Srayanta
Van Pamel, Anton
Zhukov, Leonid
Computation and Language
Information Retrieval
Large language models (LLMs) are transforming the way information is retrieved with vast amounts of knowledge being summarized and presented via natural language conversations. Yet, LLMs are prone to highlight the most frequently seen pieces of information from the training set and to neglect the rare ones. In the field of biomedical research, latest discoveries are key to academic and industrial actors and are obscured by the abundance of an ever-increasing literature corpus (the information overload problem). Surfacing new associations between biomedical entities, e.g., drugs, genes, diseases, with LLMs becomes a challenge of capturing the long-tail knowledge of the biomedical scientific production. To overcome this challenge, Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) has been proposed to alleviate some of the shortcomings of LLMs by augmenting the prompts with context retrieved from external datasets. RAG methods typically select the context via maximum similarity search over text embeddings. In this study, we show that RAG methods leave out a significant proportion of relevant information due to clusters of over-represented concepts in the biomedical literature. We introduce a novel information-retrieval method that leverages a knowledge graph to downsample these clusters and mitigate the information overload problem. Its retrieval performance is about twice better than embedding similarity alternatives on both precision and recall. Finally, we demonstrate that both embedding similarity and knowledge graph retrieval methods can be advantageously combined into a hybrid model that outperforms both, enabling potential improvements to biomedical question-answering models.
title Graph-Based Retriever Captures the Long Tail of Biomedical Knowledge
topic Computation and Language
Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.12352