2025.emnlp-demos.3@ACL

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#1 SpiritRAG: A Q&A System for Religion and Spirituality in the United Nations Archive [PDF] [Copy] [Kimi] [REL]

Authors: Yingqiang Gao, Fabian Winiger, Patrick Montjourides, Anastassia Shaitarova, Nianlong Gu, Simon Peng-Keller, Gerold Schneider

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.

Subject: EMNLP.2025 - System Demonstrations