Recent investigations into effective context lengths of modern flagship large language models (LLMs) have revealed major limitations in effective question answering (QA) and reasoning over long and complex contexts for even the largest and most impressive cadre of models. While approaches like retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and chunk-based re-ranking attempt to mitigate this issue, they are sensitive to chunking, embedding and retrieval strategies and models, and furthermore, rely on extensive pre-processing, knowledge acquisition and indexing steps. In this paper, we propose Tagging-Augmented Generation (TAG), a lightweight data augmentation strategy that boosts LLM performance in long-context scenarios, without degrading and altering the integrity and composition of retrieved documents. We validate our hypothesis by augmenting two challenging and directly relevant question-answering benchmarks – NoLima and NovelQA – and show that tagging the context or even just adding tag definitions into QA prompts leads to consistent relative performance gains over the baseline – up to 17% for 32K token contexts, and 2.9% in complex reasoning question-answering for multi-hop queries requiring knowledge across a wide span of text.

We investigate the quality of task specific word embeddings created with relatively small, targeted corpora. We present a comprehensive evaluation framework including both intrinsic and extrinsic evaluation that can be expanded to named entities beyond drug name. Intrinsic evaluation results tell that drug name embeddings created with a domain specific document corpus outperformed the previously published versions that derived from a very large general text corpus. Extrinsic evaluation uses word embedding for the task of drug name recognition with Bi-LSTM model and the results demonstrate the advantage of using domain-specific word embeddings as the only input feature for drug name recognition with F1-score achieving 0.91. This work suggests that it may be advantageous to derive domain specific embeddings for certain tasks even when the domain specific corpus is of limited size.