# Coal Mining Question Answering with LLMs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.02959 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02959/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 20 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Oct 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00751/) (2019)
- [The Power of Scale for Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08691/) (2021)
- [Learning to summarize from human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.01325/) (2020)
- [Visual In-Context Learning for Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11574/) (2024)
- [Language Models with Image Descriptors are Strong Few-Shot Video-Language Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10747/) (2022)
- [ClarET: Pre-training a Correlation-Aware Context-To-Event Transformer for Event-Centric Generation and Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02225/) (2022)
- [EventBERT: A Pre-Trained Model for Event Correlation Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06533/) (2021)
- [Fine-Grained Distillation for Long Document Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10423/) (2022)
- [Multimodal Event Transformer for Image-guided Story Ending Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11357/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [IndustryEQA: Pushing the Frontiers of Embodied Question Answering in Industrial Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20640/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we present a novel approach to coal mining question answering (QA) using large language models (LLMs) combined with tailored prompt engineering techniques. Coal mining is a complex, high-risk industry where accurate, context-aware information is critical for safe and efficient operations. Current QA systems struggle to handle the technical and dynamic nature of mining-related queries. To address these challenges, we propose a multi-turn prompt engineering framework designed to guide LLMs, such as GPT-4, in answering coal mining questions with higher precision and relevance. By breaking down complex queries into structured components, our approach allows LLMs to process nuanced technical information more effectively. We manually curated a dataset of 500 questions from real-world mining scenarios and evaluated the system's performance using both accuracy (ACC) and GPT-4-based scoring metrics. Experiments comparing ChatGPT, Claude2, and GPT-4 across baseline, chain-of-thought (CoT), and multi-turn prompting methods demonstrate that our method significantly improves both accuracy and contextual relevance, with an average accuracy improvement of 15-18% and a notable increase in GPT-4 scores. The results show that our prompt-engineering approach provides a robust, adaptable solution for domain-specific question answering in high-stakes environments like coal mining.