# Large-Scale Knowledge Synthesis and Complex Information Retrieval from Biomedical Documents

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.06854 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.06854/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Feb 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.3781/) (2013)
- [TriviaQA: A Large Scale Distantly Supervised Challenge Dataset for Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.03551/) (2017)
- [Billion-scale similarity search with GPUs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08734/) (2017)
- [MS MARCO: A Human Generated MAchine Reading COmprehension Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09268/) (2016)
- [MiniLM: Deep Self-Attention Distillation for Task-Agnostic Compression of Pre-Trained Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10957/) (2020)
- [Leveraging Passage Retrieval with Generative Models for Open Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01282/) (2020)
- [MRQA 2019 Shared Task: Evaluating Generalization in Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.09753/) (2019)
- [CORD-19: The COVID-19 Open Research Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10706/) (2020)
- [Retrieving and Reading: A Comprehensive Survey on Open-domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00774/) (2021)
- [Answering Complex Open-Domain Questions with Multi-Hop Dense Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.12756/) (2020)
- [Complex Knowledge Base Question Answering: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06688/) (2021)
- [Biomedical Question Answering: A Survey of Approaches and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05281/) (2021)
- [Answering Open-Domain Questions of Varying Reasoning Steps from Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12527/) (2020)
- [TREC-COVID: Constructing a Pandemic Information Retrieval Test Collection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.04474/) (2020)
- [COVID-19 Knowledge Graph: Accelerating Information Retrieval and Discovery for Scientific Literature](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.12731/) (2020)
- [OpenIE6: Iterative Grid Labeling and Coordination Analysis for Open Information Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03147/) (2020)
- [CovidExplorer: A Multi-faceted AI-based Search and Visualization Engine for COVID-19 Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.14618/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [IFIR: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating Instruction-Following in Expert-Domain Information Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04644/) (2025)
- [Open Challenges and Opportunities in Federated Foundation Models Towards Biomedical Healthcare](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.06784/) (2024)
- [Minimizing Factual Inconsistency and Hallucination in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13878/) (2023)
- [Towards Unified AI Drug Discovery with Multiple Knowledge Modalities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01523/) (2023)
- [Context-Aware Scientific Knowledge Extraction on Linked Open Data using Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.17580/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advances in the healthcare industry have led to an abundance of unstructured data, making it challenging to perform tasks such as efficient and accurate information retrieval at scale. Our work offers an all-in-one scalable solution for extracting and exploring complex information from large-scale research documents, which would otherwise be tedious. First, we briefly explain our knowledge synthesis process to extract helpful information from unstructured text data of research documents. Then, on top of the knowledge extracted from the documents, we perform complex information retrieval using three major components- Paragraph Retrieval, Triplet Retrieval from Knowledge Graphs, and Complex Question Answering (QA). These components combine lexical and semantic-based methods to retrieve paragraphs and triplets and perform faceted refinement for filtering these search results. The complexity of biomedical queries and documents necessitates using a QA system capable of handling queries more complex than factoid queries, which we evaluate qualitatively on the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19) to demonstrate the effectiveness and value-add.