@inproceedings{raina-gales-2024-question,
    title = "Question-Based Retrieval using Atomic Units for Enterprise {RAG}",
    author = "Raina, Vatsal  and
      Gales, Mark",
    editor = "Schlichtkrull, Michael  and
      Chen, Yulong  and
      Whitehouse, Chenxi  and
      Deng, Zhenyun  and
      Akhtar, Mubashara  and
      Aly, Rami  and
      Guo, Zhijiang  and
      Christodoulopoulos, Christos  and
      Cocarascu, Oana  and
      Mittal, Arpit  and
      Thorne, James  and
      Vlachos, Andreas",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Seventh Fact Extraction and VERification Workshop (FEVER)",
    month = nov,
    year = "2024",
    address = "Miami, Florida, USA",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2024.fever-1.25/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.fever-1.25",
    pages = "219--233",
    abstract = "Enterprise retrieval augmented generation (RAG) offers a highly flexible framework for combining powerful large language models (LLMs) with internal, possibly temporally changing, documents. In RAG, documents are first chunked. Relevant chunks are then retrieved for a user query, which are passed as context to a synthesizer LLM to generate the query response. However, the retrieval step can limit performance, as incorrect chunks can lead the synthesizer LLM to generate a false response. This work applies a zero-shot adaptation of standard dense retrieval steps for more accurate chunk recall. Specifically, a chunk is first decomposed into atomic statements. A set of synthetic questions are then generated on these atoms (with the chunk as the context). Dense retrieval involves finding the closest set of synthetic questions, and associated chunks, to the user query. It is found that retrieval with the atoms leads to higher recall than retrieval with chunks. Further performance gain is observed with retrieval using the synthetic questions generated over the atoms. Higher recall at the retrieval step enables higher performance of the enterprise LLM using the RAG pipeline."
}