Improving Scientific Document Retrieval with Academic Concept Index

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Lee, Jeyun, Lee, Junhyoung, Kweon, Wonbin, Jin, Bowen, Zhang, Yu, Yoon, Susik, Lee, Dongha, Yu, Hwanjo, Han, Jiawei, Kang, Seongku
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Lee, Jeyun
Lee, Junhyoung
Kweon, Wonbin
Jin, Bowen
Zhang, Yu
Yoon, Susik
Lee, Dongha
Yu, Hwanjo
Han, Jiawei
Kang, Seongku
author_facet Lee, Jeyun
Lee, Junhyoung
Kweon, Wonbin
Jin, Bowen
Zhang, Yu
Yoon, Susik
Lee, Dongha
Yu, Hwanjo
Han, Jiawei
Kang, Seongku
contents Adapting general-domain retrievers to scientific domains is challenging due to the scarcity of large-scale domain-specific relevance annotations and the substantial mismatch in vocabulary and information needs. Recent approaches address these issues through two independent directions that leverage large language models (LLMs): (1) generating synthetic queries for fine-tuning, and (2) generating auxiliary contexts to support relevance matching. However, both directions overlook the diverse academic concepts embedded within scientific documents, often producing redundant or conceptually narrow queries and contexts. To address this limitation, we introduce an academic concept index, which extracts key concepts from papers and organizes them guided by an academic taxonomy. This structured index serves as a foundation for improving both directions. First, we enhance the synthetic query generation with concept coverage-based generation (CCQGen), which adaptively conditions LLMs on uncovered concepts to generate complementary queries with broader concept coverage. Second, we strengthen the context augmentation with concept-focused auxiliary contexts (CCExpand), which leverages a set of document snippets that serve as concise responses to the concept-aware CCQGen queries. Extensive experiments show that incorporating the academic concept index into both query generation and context augmentation leads to higher-quality queries, better conceptual alignment, and improved retrieval performance.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_00567
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Improving Scientific Document Retrieval with Academic Concept Index
Lee, Jeyun
Lee, Junhyoung
Kweon, Wonbin
Jin, Bowen
Zhang, Yu
Yoon, Susik
Lee, Dongha
Yu, Hwanjo
Han, Jiawei
Kang, Seongku
Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
Adapting general-domain retrievers to scientific domains is challenging due to the scarcity of large-scale domain-specific relevance annotations and the substantial mismatch in vocabulary and information needs. Recent approaches address these issues through two independent directions that leverage large language models (LLMs): (1) generating synthetic queries for fine-tuning, and (2) generating auxiliary contexts to support relevance matching. However, both directions overlook the diverse academic concepts embedded within scientific documents, often producing redundant or conceptually narrow queries and contexts. To address this limitation, we introduce an academic concept index, which extracts key concepts from papers and organizes them guided by an academic taxonomy. This structured index serves as a foundation for improving both directions. First, we enhance the synthetic query generation with concept coverage-based generation (CCQGen), which adaptively conditions LLMs on uncovered concepts to generate complementary queries with broader concept coverage. Second, we strengthen the context augmentation with concept-focused auxiliary contexts (CCExpand), which leverages a set of document snippets that serve as concise responses to the concept-aware CCQGen queries. Extensive experiments show that incorporating the academic concept index into both query generation and context augmentation leads to higher-quality queries, better conceptual alignment, and improved retrieval performance.
title Improving Scientific Document Retrieval with Academic Concept Index
topic Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00567