@inproceedings{gao-etal-2025-spiritrag,
    title = "{S}pirit{RAG}: A {Q}{\&}{A} System for Religion and Spirituality in the {U}nited {N}ations Archive",
    author = "Gao, Yingqiang  and
      Winiger, Fabian  and
      Montjourides, Patrick  and
      Shaitarova, Anastassia  and
      Gu, Nianlong  and
      Peng-Keller, Simon  and
      Schneider, Gerold",
    editor = {Habernal, Ivan  and
      Schulam, Peter  and
      Tiedemann, J{\"o}rg},
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations",
    month = nov,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Suzhou, China",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.emnlp-demos.3/",
    pages = "26--41",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-334-0",
    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."
}