arXiv Computation and Language

Benchmarking Literature Retrieval for a Model Organism: A Dictyostelium Case Study

The paper presents a new retrieval benchmark for the model organism Dictyostelium, created from curator-generated queries linked to PubMed articles and gene annotations. It evaluates three niche retrieval strategies—cross‑encoder reranking, gene‑aware query expansion, and abstract‑only versus full‑text retrieval—finding that reranking and gene‑aware expansion improve results in specific contexts, while full‑text chunks boost recall and top‑rank performance when abstracts lack supporting evidence. The benchmark, data, and code are publicly released on GitHub and Zenodo.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 23

BELXTR: Biomedical Entity Linking via Contextualized Token Retrieval

BELXTR is a new biomedical entity linking model that uses a multi‑vector (late interaction) architecture to preserve token‑level matching information, unlike traditional embedding‑based approaches that compress mentions into a single vector. By extending the XTR model with a task‑specific training objective and active query expansion, BELXTR achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on half of ten evaluated corpora, with an average 5‑percentage‑point gain in recall@1. The model shows especially strong results on cross‑species gene disambiguation, outperforming an LLM‑powered retrieve‑and‑rerank pipeline and approaching a specialized rule‑based system.

By Samuele Garda, Ulf Leser
arXiv Computation and Language
4d ago

RESEARCHHUB: A Personalized Literature Discovery System for Biomedical Preprints

ResearchHub is an interactive system designed for personalized discovery of biomedical preprints. It uses a bi‑encoder retriever called prism, which leverages GPT‑4o‑generated queries and a hybrid ranking objective, to retrieve relevant papers from a MedRxiv corpus. The system enhances recommendation quality through novelty, diversity, curriculum ordering, and provides frontier retrieval, DPP‑based re‑ranking, and lightweight attribution cards, all operating with low latency.

By Viswonathan Manoranjan, Taeyoon Kim, Nicholas Do, Sang Woo Kim, Dawei Li, Zhen Tan, Tianlong Chen, Yunmei Liu
arXiv AI
Aug 6

TourSynbio-Search: A Large Language Model Driven Agent Framework for Unified Search Method for Protein Engineering

arXiv:2411. 06024v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The exponential growth in protein-related databases and scientific literature, combined with increasing demands for efficient biological information retrieval, has created an urgent need for unified and accessible search methods in protein engineering research.

By Yungeng Liu, Zan Chen, Yu Guang Wang, Yiqing Shen
arXiv AI
Sep 3

BioELX: Context-Aware Cross-lingual Biomedical Entity Linking without Task-Specific Supervision

BioELX is a retrieve‑rerank framework for cross‑lingual biomedical entity linking that tackles two key problems: the English‑biased UMLS alias training data and the degradation caused by naïvely adding context. It fine‑tunes SapBERT_multi with Wikidata‑derived cross‑lingual alias supervision to create shared concept neighborhoods, and then reranks candidates using pretrained LLMs with mention‑anchored prompting to focus on the target mention. Experiments demonstrate state‑of‑the‑art performance on four benchmarks, improving Recall@1 by 4.8–18.2 percentage points without task‑specific annotations.

By Yi Wang, Corina Dima, Liangyu Zhong, Steffen Staab
arXiv AI
Jun 18

Improving Scientific Document Retrieval with Academic Concept Index

arXiv:2601. 00567v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: 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.

By Jeyun Lee, Junhyoung Lee, Wonbin Kweon, Bowen Jin, Yu Zhang, Susik Yoon, Dongha Lee, Hwanjo Yu, Jiawei Han, Seongku Kang
arXiv AI
Oct 1

Re-ranking and Late Interaction Drive Retrieval Quality: A Controlled Comparison of RAG Strategies for Scientific Question Answering

The paper presents a controlled comparison of six retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) strategies for scientific question answering on a large arXiv corpus. All pipelines use the same LLM generator and evaluation protocol, differing only in retrieval design—ranging from classic dense retrieval to late‑interaction methods like ColBERTv2. The authors also release a synthetic question dataset and code to enable reproducible, large‑scale evaluation of RAG trade‑offs.

By Bhagyesh Rathi, Eshan Chawla, William B. Andreopoulos
arXiv Computation and Language
3d ago

How Ground Truth Shapes Retrieval Scores: Evidence-Aware Evaluation of a Retrieval-Augmented Generation System for Breast Lesions

The study introduces an evidence-aware evaluation protocol for a retrieval‑augmented generation system focused on breast lesion management literature. Using an 18‑document corpus and 18 queries, the authors compared dense embeddings, BM25, and cross‑encoder reranking across various chunk sizes and overlaps, finding that a hybrid retriever with 384‑token chunks and 20% overlap achieved top‑three retrieval success for 17 of 18 queries and high recall and precision metrics. Expanding ground‑truth relevance annotations increased recognized evidence spans and accepted chunk targets, though retrieval rankings remained unchanged, underscoring the sensitivity of evaluation to annotation coverage.

By Miguel Mochizuki Silva, Samuel Ismael, Mateus C. Dias, Tha\'is Gaud\^encio, Yuri Malheiros, Barufaldi