Patrick Montjourides
2025
SpiritRAG: A Q&A System for Religion and Spirituality in the United Nations Archive
Yingqiang Gao
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Fabian Winiger
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Patrick Montjourides
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Anastassia Shaitarova
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Nianlong Gu
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Simon Peng-Keller
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Gerold Schneider
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations
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.
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- Yingqiang Gao 1
- Nianlong Gu 1
- Simon Peng-Keller 1
- Gerold Schneider 1
- Anastassia Shaitarova 1
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