@inproceedings{bian-etal-2026-efficiently-explore,
title = "How to Efficiently Explore Noisy Historical Data? Leveraging Corpus Pre-Targeting to Enhance Graph-based {RAG}",
author = "Bian, Donghan and
Puren, Marie and
Cafiero, Florian",
editor = "Alves, Diego and
Bizzoni, Yuri and
Degaetano-Ortlieb, Stefania and
Kazantseva, Anna and
Pagel, Janis and
Szpakowicz, Stan",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 10th Joint {SIGHUM} Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature 2026",
month = mar,
year = "2026",
address = "Rabat, Morocco",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.latechclfl-1.23/",
pages = "241--250",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-373-9",
abstract = "Graph-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is increasingly used to explore long, heterogeneous, and weakly structured corpora, including historical archives. However, in such settings, naive full-corpus indexing is often computationally costly and sensitive to OCR noise, document redundancy, and topical dispersion. In this paper, we investigate corpus pre-targeting strategies as an intermediate layer to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of graph-based RAG for historical research.We evaluate a set of pre-targeting heuristics tailored to single-hop and multi-hop of historical questions on HistoriQA-ThirdRepublic, a French question-answering dataset derived from parliamentary debates and contemporary newspapers. Our results show that appropriate pre-targeting strategies can improve retrieval recall by 3{--}5{\%} while reducing token consumption by 32{--}37{\%} compared to full-corpus indexing, without degrading coverage of relevant documents.Beyond performance gains, this work highlights the importance of corpus-level optimization for applying RAG to large-scale historical collections, and provides practical insights for adapting graph-based RAG pipelines to the specific constraints of digitized archives."
}<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<modsCollection xmlns="http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3">
<mods ID="bian-etal-2026-efficiently-explore">
<titleInfo>
<title>How to Efficiently Explore Noisy Historical Data? Leveraging Corpus Pre-Targeting to Enhance Graph-based RAG</title>
</titleInfo>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Donghan</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Bian</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Marie</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Puren</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Florian</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Cafiero</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<originInfo>
<dateIssued>2026-03</dateIssued>
</originInfo>
<typeOfResource>text</typeOfResource>
<relatedItem type="host">
<titleInfo>
<title>Proceedings of the 10th Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature 2026</title>
</titleInfo>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Diego</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Alves</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Yuri</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Bizzoni</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Stefania</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Degaetano-Ortlieb</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Anna</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Kazantseva</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Janis</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Pagel</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Stan</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Szpakowicz</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<originInfo>
<publisher>Association for Computational Linguistics</publisher>
<place>
<placeTerm type="text">Rabat, Morocco</placeTerm>
</place>
</originInfo>
<genre authority="marcgt">conference publication</genre>
<identifier type="isbn">979-8-89176-373-9</identifier>
</relatedItem>
<abstract>Graph-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is increasingly used to explore long, heterogeneous, and weakly structured corpora, including historical archives. However, in such settings, naive full-corpus indexing is often computationally costly and sensitive to OCR noise, document redundancy, and topical dispersion. In this paper, we investigate corpus pre-targeting strategies as an intermediate layer to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of graph-based RAG for historical research.We evaluate a set of pre-targeting heuristics tailored to single-hop and multi-hop of historical questions on HistoriQA-ThirdRepublic, a French question-answering dataset derived from parliamentary debates and contemporary newspapers. Our results show that appropriate pre-targeting strategies can improve retrieval recall by 3–5% while reducing token consumption by 32–37% compared to full-corpus indexing, without degrading coverage of relevant documents.Beyond performance gains, this work highlights the importance of corpus-level optimization for applying RAG to large-scale historical collections, and provides practical insights for adapting graph-based RAG pipelines to the specific constraints of digitized archives.</abstract>
<identifier type="citekey">bian-etal-2026-efficiently-explore</identifier>
<location>
<url>https://aclanthology.org/2026.latechclfl-1.23/</url>
</location>
<part>
<date>2026-03</date>
<extent unit="page">
<start>241</start>
<end>250</end>
</extent>
</part>
</mods>
</modsCollection>
%0 Conference Proceedings
%T How to Efficiently Explore Noisy Historical Data? Leveraging Corpus Pre-Targeting to Enhance Graph-based RAG
%A Bian, Donghan
%A Puren, Marie
%A Cafiero, Florian
%Y Alves, Diego
%Y Bizzoni, Yuri
%Y Degaetano-Ortlieb, Stefania
%Y Kazantseva, Anna
%Y Pagel, Janis
%Y Szpakowicz, Stan
%S Proceedings of the 10th Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature 2026
%D 2026
%8 March
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Rabat, Morocco
%@ 979-8-89176-373-9
%F bian-etal-2026-efficiently-explore
%X Graph-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is increasingly used to explore long, heterogeneous, and weakly structured corpora, including historical archives. However, in such settings, naive full-corpus indexing is often computationally costly and sensitive to OCR noise, document redundancy, and topical dispersion. In this paper, we investigate corpus pre-targeting strategies as an intermediate layer to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of graph-based RAG for historical research.We evaluate a set of pre-targeting heuristics tailored to single-hop and multi-hop of historical questions on HistoriQA-ThirdRepublic, a French question-answering dataset derived from parliamentary debates and contemporary newspapers. Our results show that appropriate pre-targeting strategies can improve retrieval recall by 3–5% while reducing token consumption by 32–37% compared to full-corpus indexing, without degrading coverage of relevant documents.Beyond performance gains, this work highlights the importance of corpus-level optimization for applying RAG to large-scale historical collections, and provides practical insights for adapting graph-based RAG pipelines to the specific constraints of digitized archives.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.latechclfl-1.23/
%P 241-250
Markdown (Informal)
[How to Efficiently Explore Noisy Historical Data? Leveraging Corpus Pre-Targeting to Enhance Graph-based RAG](https://aclanthology.org/2026.latechclfl-1.23/) (Bian et al., LaTeCH-CLfL 2026)
ACL