NeuroSym-BioCAT: Leveraging Neuro-Symbolic Methods for Biomedical Scholarly Document Categorization and Question Answering

The growing volume of biomedical scholarly document abstracts presents an increasing challenge in efficiently retrieving accurate and relevant information. To address this, we introduce a novel approach that integrates an optimized topic modelling framework, OVB-LDA, with the BI-POP CMA-ES optimization technique for enhanced scholarly document abstract categorization. Complementing this, we employ the distilled MiniLM model, fine-tuned on domain-specific data, for high-precision answer extraction. Our approach is evaluated across three configurations: scholarly document abstract retrieval, gold-standard scholarly documents abstract, and gold-standard snippets, consistently outperforming established methods such as RYGH and bio-answer finder. Notably, we demonstrate that extracting answers from scholarly documents abstracts alone can yield high accuracy, underscoring the sufficiency of abstracts for many biomedical queries. Despite its compact size, MiniLM exhibits competitive performance, challenging the prevailing notion that only large, resource-intensive models can handle such complex tasks. Our results, validated across various question types and evaluation batches, highlight the robustness and adaptability of our method in real-world biomedical applications. While our approach shows promise, we identify challenges in handling complex list-type questions and inconsistencies in evaluation metrics. Future work will focus on refining the topic model with more extensive domain-specific datasets, further optimizing MiniLM and utilizing large language models (LLM) to improve both precision and efficiency in biomedical question answering.

Fine-tuning and Prompt Engineering with Cognitive Knowledge Graphs for Scholarly Knowledge Organization

The increasing amount of published scholarly articles, exceeding 2.5 million yearly, raises the challenge for researchers in following scientific progress. Integrating the contributions from scholarly articles into a novel type of cognitive knowledge graph (CKG) will be a crucial element for accessing and organizing scholarly knowledge, surpassing the insights provided by titles and abstracts. This research focuses on effectively conveying structured scholarly knowledge by utilizing large language models (LLMs) to categorize scholarly articles and describe their contributions in a structured and comparable manner. While previous studies explored language models within specific research domains, the extensive domain-independent knowledge captured by LLMs offers a substantial opportunity for generating structured contribution descriptions as CKGs. Additionally, LLMs offer customizable pathways through prompt engineering or fine-tuning, thus facilitating to leveraging of smaller LLMs known for their efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and environmental considerations. Our methodology involves harnessing LLM knowledge, and complementing it with domain expert-verified scholarly data sourced from a CKG. This strategic fusion significantly enhances LLM performance, especially in tasks like scholarly article categorization and predicate recommendation. Our method involves fine-tuning LLMs with CKG knowledge and additionally injecting knowledge from a CKG with a novel prompting technique significantly increasing the accuracy of scholarly knowledge extraction. We integrated our approach in the Open Research Knowledge Graph (ORKG), thus enabling precise access to organized scholarly knowledge, crucially benefiting domain-independent scholarly knowledge exchange and dissemination among policymakers, industrial practitioners, and the general public.