Yingjian Chen

Yingjian Chen, Feiyang Li, Xingyu Song et al.

Large language models (LLMs) perform well in medical QA, but their effectiveness in Japanese contexts is limited due to privacy constraints that prevent the use of commercial models like GPT-4 in clinical settings. As a result, recent efforts focus on instruction-tuning open-source LLMs, though the potential of combining them with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) remains underexplored. To bridge this gap, we are the first to explore a knowledge graph-based (KG) RAG framework for Japanese medical QA small-scale open-source LLMs. Experimental results show that KG-based RAG has only a limited impact on Japanese medical QA using small-scale open-source LLMs. Further case studies reveal that the effectiveness of the RAG is sensitive to the quality and relevance of the external retrieved content. These findings offer valuable insights into the challenges and potential of applying RAG in Japanese medical QA, while also serving as a reference for other low-resource languages.

Feiyang Li, Yingjian Chen, Haoran Liu et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable progress in medical question answering (QA), yet their effectiveness remains predominantly limited to English due to imbalanced multilingual training data and scarce medical resources for low-resource languages. To address this critical language gap in medical QA, we propose Multilingual Knowledge Graph-based Retrieval Ranking (MKG-Rank), a knowledge graph-enhanced framework that enables English-centric LLMs to perform multilingual medical QA. Through a word-level translation mechanism, our framework efficiently integrates comprehensive English-centric medical knowledge graphs into LLM reasoning at a low cost, mitigating cross-lingual semantic distortion and achieving precise medical QA across language barriers. To enhance efficiency, we introduce caching and multi-angle ranking strategies to optimize the retrieval process, significantly reducing response times and prioritizing relevant medical knowledge. Extensive evaluations on multilingual medical QA benchmarks across Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Swahili demonstrate that MKG-Rank consistently outperforms zero-shot LLMs, achieving maximum 35.03% increase in accuracy, while maintaining an average retrieval time of only 0.0009 seconds.