Demo: Guide-RAG: Evidence-Driven Corpus Curation for Retrieval-Augmented Generation in Long COVID

Philip DiGiacomo, Haoyang Wang, Jinrui Fang, Yan Leng, William Brode, Ying Ding

Keywords: LLM, RAG, long COVID

TL;DR: We determined the effect of RAG corpus selection on the faithfulness, relevance, and comprehensiveness of chatbot responses to long COVID clinical questions.

Abstract: As AI chatbots gain adoption in clinical medicine, developing effective frameworks for complex, emerging diseases presents significant challenges. We developed and evaluated six Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) corpus configurations for Long COVID (LC) clinical question answering, ranging from expert-curated sources to large-scale literature databases. Our evaluation employed an LLM-as-a-judge framework across faithfulness, relevance, and comprehensiveness metrics using LongCOVID-CQ, a novel dataset of expert-generated clinical questions. Our RAG corpus configuration combining clinical guidelines with high-quality systematic reviews consistently outperformed both narrow single-guideline approaches and large-scale literature databases. Our findings suggest that for emerging diseases, retrieval grounded in curated secondary reviews provides an optimal balance between narrow consensus documents and unfiltered primary literature, supporting clinical decision-making while avoiding information overload and oversimplified guidance. We propose Guide-RAG, a chatbot system and accompanying evaluation framework that integrates both curated expert knowledge and comprehensive literature databases to effectively answer LC clinical questions.

Submission Number: 160