SpiritRAG: A Q&A System for Religion and Spirituality in the United Nations Archive

TL;DR

SpiritRAG is an interactive Q&A system that enables efficient, context-sensitive searches of large UN archives related to religion and spirituality, aiding researchers and policymakers in extracting insights without extensive manual effort.

Contribution

This paper introduces SpiritRAG, a novel retrieval-augmented generation system tailored for complex R/S queries in large UN datasets, enhancing accessibility and usability.

Findings

Effective retrieval of R/S information from UN documents

User-friendly chat-based interface demonstrated in pilot tests

Improved efficiency in extracting insights from large archives

Abstract

Religion and spirituality (R/S) are complex and highly domain-dependent concepts which have long confounded researchers and policymakers. Due to their context-specificity, R/S are difficult to operationalize in conventional archival search strategies, particularly when datasets are very large, poorly accessible, and marked by information noise. As a result, considerable time investments and specialist knowledge is often needed to extract actionable insights related to R/S from general archival sources, increasing reliance on published literature and manual desk reviews. To address this challenge, we present SpiritRAG, an interactive Question Answering (Q&A) system based on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). Built using 7,500 United Nations (UN) resolution documents related to R/S in the domains of health and education, SpiritRAG allows researchers and policymakers to conduct complex, context-sensitive database searches of very large datasets using an easily accessible, chat-based web interface. SpiritRAG is lightweight to deploy and leverages both UN documents and user provided documents as source material. A pilot test and evaluation with domain experts on 100 manually composed questions demonstrates the practical value and usefulness of SpiritRAG.