RAG-QA Arena: Evaluating Domain Robustness for Long-form Retrieval Augmented Question Answering

Rujun Han, Yuhao Zhang, Peng Qi, Yumo Xu, Jenyuan Wang, Lan Liu, William Yang Wang, Bonan Min, Vittorio Castelli


Abstract
Question answering based on retrieval augmented generation (RAG-QA) is an important research topic in NLP and has a wide range of real-world applications. However, most existing datasets for this task are either constructed using a single source corpus or consist of short extractive answers, which fall short of evaluating large language model (LLM) based RAG-QA systems on cross-domain generalization. To address these limitations, we create Long-form RobustQA (LFRQA), a new dataset comprising human-written long-form answers that integrate short extractive answers from multiple documents into a single, coherent narrative, covering 26K queries and large corpora across seven different domains. We further propose RAG-QA Arena by directly comparing model-generated answers against LFRQA’s answers using LLMs as evaluators. We show via extensive experiments that RAG-QA Arena and human judgments on answer quality are highly correlated. Moreover, only 41.3% of the most competitive LLM’s answers are preferred to LFRQA’s answers, demonstrating RAG-QA Arena as a challenging evaluation platform for future research.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.249
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
4354–4374
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.249
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Rujun Han, Yuhao Zhang, Peng Qi, Yumo Xu, Jenyuan Wang, Lan Liu, William Yang Wang, Bonan Min, and Vittorio Castelli. 2024. RAG-QA Arena: Evaluating Domain Robustness for Long-form Retrieval Augmented Question Answering. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 4354–4374, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
RAG-QA Arena: Evaluating Domain Robustness for Long-form Retrieval Augmented Question Answering (Han et al., EMNLP 2024)
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https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.249.pdf
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 2024.emnlp-main.249.software.zip