Mind the Gap: Aligning Knowledge Bases with User Needs to Enhance Mental Health Retrieval

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Chan, Amanda, Liu, James Jiayu, Kai, He, Kampman, Onno P.
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866912723900563456
author Chan, Amanda
Liu, James Jiayu
Kai, He
Kampman, Onno P.
author_facet Chan, Amanda
Liu, James Jiayu
Kai, He
Kampman, Onno P.
contents Access to reliable mental health information is vital for early help-seeking, yet expanding knowledge bases is resource-intensive and often misaligned with user needs. This results in poor performance of retrieval systems when presented concerns are not covered or expressed in informal or contextualized language. We present an AI-based gap-informed framework for corpus augmentation that authentically identifies underrepresented topics (gaps) by overlaying naturalistic user data such as forum posts in order to prioritize expansions based on coverage and usefulness. In a case study, we compare Directed (gap-informed augmentations) with Non-Directed augmentation (random additions), evaluating the relevance and usefulness of retrieved information across four retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines. Directed augmentation achieved near-optimal performance with modest expansions--requiring only a 42% increase for Query Transformation, 74% for Reranking and Hierarchical, and 318% for Baseline--to reach ~95% of the performance of an exhaustive reference corpus. In contrast, Non-Directed augmentation required substantially larger and thus practically infeasible expansions to achieve comparable performance (232%, 318%, 403%, and 763%, respectively). These results show that strategically targeted corpus growth can reduce content creation demands while sustaining high retrieval and provision quality, offering a scalable approach for building trusted health information repositories and supporting generative AI applications in high-stakes domains.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_13626
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Mind the Gap: Aligning Knowledge Bases with User Needs to Enhance Mental Health Retrieval
Chan, Amanda
Liu, James Jiayu
Kai, He
Kampman, Onno P.
Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
H.3.3; J.3; I.2.7
Access to reliable mental health information is vital for early help-seeking, yet expanding knowledge bases is resource-intensive and often misaligned with user needs. This results in poor performance of retrieval systems when presented concerns are not covered or expressed in informal or contextualized language. We present an AI-based gap-informed framework for corpus augmentation that authentically identifies underrepresented topics (gaps) by overlaying naturalistic user data such as forum posts in order to prioritize expansions based on coverage and usefulness. In a case study, we compare Directed (gap-informed augmentations) with Non-Directed augmentation (random additions), evaluating the relevance and usefulness of retrieved information across four retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines. Directed augmentation achieved near-optimal performance with modest expansions--requiring only a 42% increase for Query Transformation, 74% for Reranking and Hierarchical, and 318% for Baseline--to reach ~95% of the performance of an exhaustive reference corpus. In contrast, Non-Directed augmentation required substantially larger and thus practically infeasible expansions to achieve comparable performance (232%, 318%, 403%, and 763%, respectively). These results show that strategically targeted corpus growth can reduce content creation demands while sustaining high retrieval and provision quality, offering a scalable approach for building trusted health information repositories and supporting generative AI applications in high-stakes domains.
title Mind the Gap: Aligning Knowledge Bases with User Needs to Enhance Mental Health Retrieval
topic Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
H.3.3; J.3; I.2.7
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13626