Seeing the Forest Through the Trees: Knowledge Retrieval for Streamlining Particle Physics Analysis

Abstract: Generative LLMs are a promising approach to structuring knowledge contained within the corpora of research literature produced by large-scale and long-running scientific collaborations. Within experimental particle physics, such structured knowledge bases could expedite methodological and editorial review. Complementarily, within the broader scientific community, generative LLM systems grounded in published work could make for reliable companions allowing non-experts to analyze open-access data. Techniques such as Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) rely on semantically matching localized text chunks, but struggle to maintain coherent context when relevant information spans multiple segments, leading to a fragmented representation devoid of global cross-document information. Here, we utilize the hierarchical organization of experimental physics articles to build a tree representation of the corpus, and present the SciTreeRAG system that uses this structure to create contexts that are more focused and contextually rich than standard RAG. Additionally, we develop methods for using LLMs to transform the unstructured corpus into a structured knowledge graph representation. We then implement SciGraphRAG, a retrieval system that leverages this knowledge graph to access global cross-document relationships eluding standard RAG, thereby encapsulating domain-specific connections and expertise. We demonstrate proof-of-concept implementations using the corpus of the LHCb experiment at CERN.