Linghan Zheng


2025

pdf bib
EXPLAIN: Enhancing Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Entity Summary
Yaozhen Liang | Xiao Liu | Jiajun Yu | Zhouhua Fang | Qunsheng Zou | Linghan Zheng | Yong Li | Zhiwei Liu | Haishuai Wang
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 6: Industry Track)

Document question answering plays a crucial role in enhancing employee productivity by providing quick and accurate access to information. Two primary approaches have been developed: retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), which reduces input tokens and inference costs, and long-context question answering (LC), which processes entire documents for higher accuracy. We introduce EXPLAIN (EXtracting, Pre-summarizing, Linking and enhAcINg RAG), a novel retrieval-augmented generation method that automatically extracts useful entities and generates summaries from documents. EXPLAIN improves accuracy by retrieving more informative entity summaries, achieving precision comparable to LC while maintaining low token consumption. Experimental results on internal dataset (ROUGE-L from 30.14% to 30.31%) and three public datasets (HotpotQA, 2WikiMQA, and Quality, average score from 62% to 64%) demonstrate the efficacy of EXPLAIN. Human evaluation in ant group production deployment indicates EXPLAIN surpasses baseline RAG in comprehensiveness.