Leveraging External Knowledge Bases: Analyzing Presentation Methods and Their Impact on Model Performance

Hui-Syuan Yeh, Thomas Lavergne, Pierre Zweigenbaum


Abstract
Integrating external knowledge into large language models has demonstrated potential for performance improvement across a wide range of tasks. This approach is particularly appealing in domain-specific applications, such as in the biomedical field. However, the strategies for effectively presenting external knowledge to these models remain underexplored. This study investigates the impact of different knowledge presentation methods and their influence on model performance. Our results show that inserting knowledge between demonstrations helps the models perform better, and improve smaller LLMs (7B) to perform on par with larger LLMs (175B). Our further investigation indicates that the performance improvement, however, comes more from the effect of additional tokens and positioning than from the relevance of the knowledge.
Anthology ID:
2025.cl4health-1.16
Volume:
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Patient-Oriented Language Processing (CL4Health)
Month:
May
Year:
2025
Address:
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Editors:
Sophia Ananiadou, Dina Demner-Fushman, Deepak Gupta, Paul Thompson
Venues:
CL4Health | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
193–204
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.cl4health-1.16/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Hui-Syuan Yeh, Thomas Lavergne, and Pierre Zweigenbaum. 2025. Leveraging External Knowledge Bases: Analyzing Presentation Methods and Their Impact on Model Performance. In Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Patient-Oriented Language Processing (CL4Health), pages 193–204, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Leveraging External Knowledge Bases: Analyzing Presentation Methods and Their Impact on Model Performance (Yeh et al., CL4Health 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.cl4health-1.16.pdf