Retrieval augmented generation based dynamic prompting for few-shot biomedical named entity recognition using large language models

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Ge, Yao, Das, Sudeshna, Guo, Yuting, Sarker, Abeed
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Ge, Yao
Das, Sudeshna
Guo, Yuting
Sarker, Abeed
author_facet Ge, Yao
Das, Sudeshna
Guo, Yuting
Sarker, Abeed
contents Biomedical named entity recognition (NER) is a high-utility natural language processing (NLP) task, and large language models (LLMs) show promise particularly in few-shot settings (i.e., limited training data). In this article, we address the performance challenges of LLMs for few-shot biomedical NER by investigating a dynamic prompting strategy involving retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). In our approach, the annotated in-context learning examples are selected based on their similarities with the input texts, and the prompt is dynamically updated for each instance during inference. We implemented and optimized static and dynamic prompt engineering techniques and evaluated them on five biomedical NER datasets. Static prompting with structured components increased average F1-scores by 12% for GPT-4, and 11% for GPT-3.5 and LLaMA 3-70B, relative to basic static prompting. Dynamic prompting further improved performance, with TF-IDF and SBERT retrieval methods yielding the best results, improving average F1-scores by 7.3% and 5.6% in 5-shot and 10-shot settings, respectively. These findings highlight the utility of contextually adaptive prompts via RAG for biomedical NER.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_06504
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Retrieval augmented generation based dynamic prompting for few-shot biomedical named entity recognition using large language models
Ge, Yao
Das, Sudeshna
Guo, Yuting
Sarker, Abeed
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Biomedical named entity recognition (NER) is a high-utility natural language processing (NLP) task, and large language models (LLMs) show promise particularly in few-shot settings (i.e., limited training data). In this article, we address the performance challenges of LLMs for few-shot biomedical NER by investigating a dynamic prompting strategy involving retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). In our approach, the annotated in-context learning examples are selected based on their similarities with the input texts, and the prompt is dynamically updated for each instance during inference. We implemented and optimized static and dynamic prompt engineering techniques and evaluated them on five biomedical NER datasets. Static prompting with structured components increased average F1-scores by 12% for GPT-4, and 11% for GPT-3.5 and LLaMA 3-70B, relative to basic static prompting. Dynamic prompting further improved performance, with TF-IDF and SBERT retrieval methods yielding the best results, improving average F1-scores by 7.3% and 5.6% in 5-shot and 10-shot settings, respectively. These findings highlight the utility of contextually adaptive prompts via RAG for biomedical NER.
title Retrieval augmented generation based dynamic prompting for few-shot biomedical named entity recognition using large language models
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06504