Bridging Dual Knowledge Graphs for Multi-Hop Question Answering in Construction Safety

TL;DR

This paper presents BifrostRAG, a dual-graph retrieval-augmented system that enhances multi-hop question answering in construction safety by modeling linguistic and structural relationships, significantly improving accuracy.

Contribution

Introduces BifrostRAG, a novel dual-graph RAG system combining graph traversal and semantic search for better multi-hop reasoning in complex regulatory texts.

Findings

Achieves 92.8% precision and 87.3% F1 score on a multi-hop question dataset.

Outperforms vector-only and graph-only RAG baselines.

Provides a transferable blueprint for navigating complex technical documents.

Abstract

Information retrieval and question answering from safety regulations are essential for automated construction compliance checking but are hindered by the linguistic and structural complexity of regulatory text. Many queries are multi-hop, requiring synthesis across interlinked clauses. To address the challenge, this paper introduces BifrostRAG, a dual-graph retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system that models both linguistic relationships and document structure. The proposed architecture supports a hybrid retrieval mechanism that combines graph traversal with vector-based semantic search, enabling large language models to reason over both the content and the structure of the text. On a multi-hop question dataset, BifrostRAG achieves 92.8% precision, 85.5% recall, and an F1 score of 87.3%. These results significantly outperform vector-only and graph-only RAG baselines, establishing BifrostRAG as a robust knowledge engine for LLM-driven compliance checking. The dual-graph, hybrid retrieval mechanism presented in this paper offers a transferable blueprint for navigating complex technical documents across knowledge-intensive engineering domains.