Know Your RAG: Dataset Taxonomy and Generation Strategies for Evaluating RAG Systems

Rafael Teixeira de Lima, Shubham Gupta, Cesar Berrospi Ramis, Lokesh Mishra, Michele Dolfi, Peter Staar, Panagiotis Vagenas


Abstract
Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) systems are a widespread application of Large Language Models (LLMs) in the industry. While many tools exist empowering developers to build their own systems, measuring their performance locally, with datasets reflective of the system’s use cases, is a technological challenge. Solutions to this problem range from non-specific and cheap (most public datasets) to specific and costly (generating data from local documents). In this paper, we show that using public question and answer (Q&A) datasets to assess retrieval performance can lead to non-optimal systems design, and that common tools for RAG dataset generation can lead to unbalanced data. We propose solutions to these issues based on the characterization of RAG datasets through labels and through label-targeted data generation. Finally, we show that fine-tuned small LLMs can efficiently generate Q&A datasets. We believe that these observations are invaluable to the know-your-data step of RAG systems development.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-industry.4
Volume:
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Industry Track
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert, Kareem Darwish, Apoorv Agarwal
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
39–57
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-industry.4/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Rafael Teixeira de Lima, Shubham Gupta, Cesar Berrospi Ramis, Lokesh Mishra, Michele Dolfi, Peter Staar, and Panagiotis Vagenas. 2025. Know Your RAG: Dataset Taxonomy and Generation Strategies for Evaluating RAG Systems. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Industry Track, pages 39–57, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Know Your RAG: Dataset Taxonomy and Generation Strategies for Evaluating RAG Systems (Teixeira de Lima et al., COLING 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-industry.4.pdf