KITLM: Domain-Specific Knowledge InTegration into Language Models for Question Answering

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in a wide range of natural language tasks. However, as these models continue to grow in size, they face significant challenges in terms of computational costs. Additionally, LLMs often lack efficient domain-specific understanding, which is particularly crucial in specialized fields such as aviation and healthcare. To boost the domain-specific understanding, we propose, KITLM, a novel knowledge base integration approach into language model through relevant information infusion. By integrating pertinent knowledge, not only the performance of the language model is greatly enhanced, but the model size requirement is also significantly reduced while achieving comparable performance. Our proposed knowledge-infused model surpasses the performance of both GPT-3.5-turbo and the state-of-the-art knowledge infusion method, SKILL, achieving over 1.5 times improvement in exact match scores on the MetaQA. KITLM showed a similar performance boost in the aviation domain with AeroQA. The drastic performance improvement of KITLM over the existing methods can be attributed to the infusion of relevant knowledge while mitigating noise. In addition, we release two curated datasets to accelerate knowledge infusion research in specialized fields: a) AeroQA, a new benchmark dataset designed for multi-hop question-answering within the aviation domain, and b) Aviation Corpus, a dataset constructed from unstructured text extracted from the National Transportation Safety Board reports. Our research contributes to advancing the field of domain-specific language understanding and showcases the potential of knowledge infusion techniques in improving the performance of language models on question-answering.