Ke Lu
Author directory2026
Medical Bilingualism: Cross-Ontology Graph Retrieval for Incommensurable Knowledge Bases
Zixuan Wang | Ke Lu | Zihan Wang | Junwei Lei | Junhao Dong | Jinyu Guo | Chaomeng Chen
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Zixuan Wang | Ke Lu | Zihan Wang | Junwei Lei | Junhao Dong | Jinyu Guo | Chaomeng Chen
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Graph-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (GraphRAG) can fail in interdisciplinary medicine where evidence comes from incommensurable knowledge systems, e.g., Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) and Western Medicine (WM). Similarity-driven retrieval in a shared latent space may over-unify heterogeneous concepts, causing semantic collapse (spurious alignments, provenance-blind mixing, and broken multi-hop chains). We propose Xonto-RAG, a cross-ontology GraphRAG framework that avoids ontological unification by constructing a dual-ontology graph with typed bridges induced via LLM-assisted verify-and-vote. A query-aware Relational Graph Attention Network (RGAT) then assembles compact, provenance-tracked multi-hop evidence subgraphs for grounded generation. Across TCM–WM benchmarks, Xonto-RAG outperforms strong RAG/GraphRAG baselines, seeing up to +22.2% accuracy on MLEC-QA TCWM (vs. OG-RAG), 77.0% accuracy with a 7B backbone, and 85.1% faithfulness on MLEC-TCM, while reducing semantic-collapse failures and yielding interpretable reasoning chains.