2024/08/21 by Priyanka Mandikal, Mandikal, Priyanka
Computer Science · #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #Computers and Society (cs.CY) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Information Retrieval (cs.IR) #Natural Language Processing Techniques
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2408.11903
openalex publication_date 2024/08/21 · openalex created_date 2024/09/21 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
LLMs have revolutionized the landscape of information retrieval and knowledge dissemination. However, their application in specialized areas is often hindered by factual inaccuracies and hallucinations, especially in long-tail knowledge distributions. We explore the potential of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) models for long-form question answering (LFQA) in a specialized knowledge domain. We present VedantaNY-10M, a dataset curated from extensive public discourses on the ancient Indian philosophy of Advaita Vedanta. We develop and benchmark a RAG model against a standard, non-RAG LLM, focusing on transcription, retrieval, and generation performance. Human evaluations by computational linguists and domain experts show that the RAG model significantly outperforms the standard model in producing factual and comprehensive responses having fewer hallucinations. In addition, a keyword-based hybrid retriever that emphasizes unique low-frequency terms further improves results. Our study provides insights into effectively integrating modern large language models with ancient knowledge systems. Project page with dataset and code: https://sites.google.com/view/vedantany-10m