DOMAIN-SPECIFIC ADAPTATION AND MULTI-HOP REASONING IN CHEMISTRY AND BIOMEDICINE
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) and embedding techniques have transformed general-purpose NLP, but their performance degrades on specialized scientific texts. In this thesis, we make three contributions to bridge this gap. First, we introduce two large-scale benchmark suites: ChemTEB, comprising 35 tasks on chemical corpora drawn from PubChem, CoconutDB, Safety Data Sheets, and Wikipedia; and MedTEB, comprising 51 medical tasks spanning EHR notes, PubMed abstracts, and clinical question–answer sets. Both cover classification, clustering, pair classification, retrieval, and bitext mining. Second, we propose MedTE, a 768-dimensional embedding model fine-tuned via self-supervised contrastive learning on an extensive biomedical corpus, which achieves state-of-the-art performance on MedTEB. Third, we develop GraphRAG, an automated pipeline that constructs chemical knowledge graphs from ChemRxiv preprints and generates multi-hop questions to assess compositional reasoning. Through rigorous evaluation, we show that ChemTEB reveals critical weaknesses in current chemical embeddings and that even with perfect context, LLMs achieve under 50\% accuracy on multi-hop chemistry question answering. We release all benchmarks, code, and models to foster further research in domain adaptation and compositional reasoning for specialized NLP applications.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".