BM25 and Dense Retrieval Are Complementary for Portuguese Clinical Text: An Empirical Study of Hybrid RAG Across 500 Clinical Queries
Abstract
Abstract How should retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems be configured for clinical decision support in Portuguese? Despite growing deployment of LLM-based clinical tools in Latin America, no empirical study has evaluated hybrid retrieval strategies for Portuguese medical text. We present an evaluation of 500 clinical queries across 6 medical specialties against a production clinical corpus, comparing BM25, dense, and hybrid retrieval with Reciprocal Rank Fusion (RRF). Four findings emerge: (1) BM25 and hybrid retrieval surface statistically distinct document sets (McNemar chi2 = 39.55, p
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