Enhancing Geological Knowledge Engineering with Retrieval-Augmented Generation: A Case Study of the Qin–Hang Metallogenic Belt

Abstract

This study presents a domain-adapted retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipeline that integrates geological knowledge with large language models (LLMs) to support intelligent question answering in the metallogenic domain. Focusing on the Qin–Hang metallogenic belt in South China, we construct a bilingual question-answering (QA) corpus derived from 615 authoritative geological publications, covering topics such as regional tectonics, ore-forming processes, structural evolution, and mineral resources. Using the ChatGLM3-6B language model and LangChain framework, we embed the corpus into a semantic vector database via Sentence-BERT and FAISS, enabling dynamic retrieval and grounded response generation. The RAG-enhanced model significantly outperforms baseline LLMs—including ChatGPT-4, Bing, and Gemini—in a comparative evaluation using BLEU, precision, recall, and F1 metrics, achieving an F1 score of 0.8689. The approach demonstrates high domain adaptability and reproducibility. All datasets and codes are openly released to facilitate application in other metallogenic belts. This work illustrates the potential of LLM-based knowledge engineering to support digital geoscientific research and smart mining.