Search arXiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2602.00011

Chained Prompting for Better Systematic Review Search Strategies

Fatima Nasser·Fouad Trad·Ammar Mohanna·Ghada El-Hajj Fuleihan·Ali Chehab
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Systematic reviews require the use of rigorously designed search strategies to ensure both comprehensive retrieval and minimization of bias. Conventional manual approaches, although methodologically systematic, are resource-intensive and susceptible to subjectivity, whereas heuristic and automated techniques frequently under-perform in recall unless supplemented by extensive expert input. We introduce a Large Language Model (LLM)-based chained prompt engineering framework for the automated development of search strategies in systematic reviews. The framework replicates the procedural structure of manual search design while leveraging LLMs to decompose review objectives, extract and formalize PICO elements, generate conceptual representations, expand terminologies, and synthesize Boolean queries. In addition to query construction, the framework exhibits superior performance in generating well-structured PICO elements relative to existing methods, thereby strengthening the foundation for high-recall search strategies. Evaluation on a subset of the LEADSInstruct dataset demonstrates that the framework attains a 0.9 average recall. These results significantly exceed the performance of existing approaches. Error analysis further highlights the critical role of precise objective specification and terminological alignment in optimizing retrieval effectiveness. These findings confirm the capacity of LLM-based pipelines to yield transparent, reproducible, and high-performing search strategies, and highlight their potential as scalable instruments for supporting evidence synthesis and evidence-based practice.

Explore related subjects

cs.IRcs.AIcs.CL

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Fatima Nasser, Fouad Trad, Ammar Mohanna, Ghada El-Hajj Fuleihan, Ali Chehab. 2025-11-28. Chained Prompting for Better Systematic Review Search Strategies. https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.00011

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Do Large Language Models Favor Recent Content? A Study on Recency Bias in LLM-Based Reranking

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in information systems, including being used as second-stage rerankers in information retrieval pipelines, yet their susceptibility to recency bias has received little attention. We investigate whether LLMs implicitly favour newer documents by prepending artificial publication dates to passages in the TREC Deep Learning passage retrieval collections in 2021 (DL21) and 2022 (DL22). Across seven models, GPT-3.5-turbo, GPT-4o, GPT-4, LLaMA-3 8B/70B, and Qwen-2.5 7B/72B, "fresh" passages are consistently promoted, shifting the Top-10's mean publication year forward by up to 4.78 years and moving individual items by as many as 95 ranks in our listwise reranking experiments. Although larger models attenuate the effect, none eliminate it. We also observe that the preference of LLMs between two passages with an identical relevance level can be reversed by up to 25% on average after date injection in our pairwise preference experiments. These findings provide quantitative evidence of a pervasive recency bias in LLMs and highlight the importance of effective bias-mitigation strategies.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2026

UniRec: Cross-stage Multi-Task Fusion with Preference Alignment for Cascaded Recommender Systems

Industrial recommender systems cascade stages with different objectives, feature spaces, and latency constraints. Optimizing pre-ranking and ranking separately induces cross-stage inconsistency: upstream models may filter out items preferred by downstream rankers, while independently tuned downstream fusion can offset upstream improvements. Most existing multi-task fusion methods target the ranking stage alone, and cross-stage methods often align with a downstream-derived score, leaving joint optimization of fusion modules across cascaded stages largely unexplored. We propose UniRec, a Unified Cross-stage Recommendation Fusion model. First, the two fusion agents partially share input embeddings in a single computation graph, allowing gradients from either stage to propagate through the shared representations. Second, a dual-axis preference alignment objective coordinates the two stages: horizontally, a compact aggregation term reorganizes dozens of pairwise objectives over heterogeneous prior signals into bidirectional preference evidence; vertically, a cross-stage consistency term transfers downstream pairwise preferences to the upstream fusion score. Third, we introduce attribute group-relative regularization, which computes relative advantages and normalizes policy updates within each attribute group, ensuring that uniformly promoting all items in a high-reward group provides no additional optimization gain. Offline experiments demonstrate UniRec consistently outperforms single-stage fusion and cross-stage coordination baselines; online A/B experiments show a 0.616% gain in app usage duration. UniRec has been fully deployed on the Kuaishou platform.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2026

Scaling Articulated Rationales for MLLM-based Recommendation

We presented SARA, an industrial framework that transforms sparse articulated user rationales into scalable recommendation signals. Its data engine curates questionnaire responses into SARA-HQ, providing explicit preference supervision for aligning SARA-7B through SFT and Quality-Refining DPO. This alignment extends rationale generation from $86{,}564$ questionnaire-covered authors to the full $10$M-author space. SARA-Ranker translates the generated positive and negative rationales into features for user--author interaction modeling and negative-feedback history modeling, connecting articulated reasons to production ranking. Evaluation on unseen authors demonstrates that SARA-7B generates more specific, relevant, and grounded rationales than the evaluated general-purpose MLLMs. On top of a strong industrial ranking baseline with multimodal features, separate online A/B tests show that positive-rationale integration increases watch time by $0.99\%$, while negative-rationale integration reduces Hate feedback by $8.16\%$. Daily refresh and more than $30$ days of production deployment further demonstrate the operational feasibility of the approach. These findings establish articulated rationales as a useful complement to behavioral and content signals, and demonstrate a practical role for MLLMs in scaling sparse human explanations into preference information that improves industrial recommendation.

cs.IR↗