PolicyBot - Reliable Question Answering over Policy Documents
Gautam Nagarajan, Omir Kumar, Sudarsun Santhiappan

TL;DR
PolicyBot is a transparent, reproducible question-answering system over complex policy documents, combining advanced retrieval and generation techniques to improve accessibility and trustworthiness for citizens seeking legal information.
Contribution
The paper introduces PolicyBot, a novel RAG system tailored for policy documents that emphasizes transparency, multilingual support, and open-source implementation for trustworthy governance-related QA.
Findings
Effective domain-specific semantic chunking improves retrieval accuracy.
Citation tracing reduces hallucinations and enhances trust.
Open-source pipeline facilitates adaptation to other domains.
Abstract
All citizens of a country are affected by the laws and policies introduced by their government. These laws and policies serve essential functions for citizens. Such as granting them certain rights or imposing specific obligations. However, these documents are often lengthy, complex, and difficult to navigate, making it challenging for citizens to locate and understand relevant information. This work presents PolicyBot, a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system designed to answer user queries over policy documents with a focus on transparency and reproducibility. The system combines domain-specific semantic chunking, multilingual dense embeddings, multi-stage retrieval with reranking, and source-aware generation to provide responses grounded in the original documents. We implemented citation tracing to reduce hallucinations and improve user trust, and evaluated alternative retrieval…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsTopic Modeling · Multimodal Machine Learning Applications · Expert finding and Q&A systems
