Domain-specific embedding models for hydrology and environmental sciences: enhancing semantic retrieval and question answering

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong performance across natural language processing tasks, yet their general-purpose embeddings often fall short in domains with specialized terminology and complex syntax, such as hydrology and environmental science. This study introduces HydroEmbed, a suite of open-source sentence embedding models fine-tuned for four QA formats: multiple-choice (MCQ), true/false (TF), fill-in-the-blank (FITB), and open-ended questions. Models were trained on the HydroLLM Benchmark, a domain-aligned dataset combining textbook and scientific article content. Fine-tuning strategies included MultipleNegativesRankingLoss, CosineSimilarityLoss, and TripletLoss, selected to match each task's semantic structure. Evaluation was conducted on a held-out set of 400 textbook-derived QA pairs, using top-k similarity-based context retrieval and GPT-4o-mini for answer generation. Results show that the fine-tuned models match or exceed performance of strong proprietary and open-source baselines, particularly in FITB and open-ended tasks, where domain alignment significantly improves semantic precision. The MCQ/TF model also achieved competitive accuracy. These findings highlight the value of task- and domain-specific embedding models for building robust retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines and intelligent QA systems in scientific domains. This work represents a foundational step toward HydroLLM, a domain-specialized language model ecosystem for environmental sciences.