Muhammed Yusuf Kartal
2026
RAGTurk: Best Practices for Retrieval Augmented Generation in Turkish
Süha Kağan Köse | Mehmet Can Baytekin | Burak Aktaş | Bilge Kaan Görür | Evren Ayberk Munis | Deniz Yılmaz | Muhammed Yusuf Kartal | Cagri Toraman
Proceedings of the Second Workshop Natural Language Processing for Turkic Languages (SIGTURK 2026)
Süha Kağan Köse | Mehmet Can Baytekin | Burak Aktaş | Bilge Kaan Görür | Evren Ayberk Munis | Deniz Yılmaz | Muhammed Yusuf Kartal | Cagri Toraman
Proceedings of the Second Workshop Natural Language Processing for Turkic Languages (SIGTURK 2026)
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enhances LLM factuality, yet design guidance remains English-centric, limiting insights for morphologically rich languages like Turkish. We address this by constructing a comprehensive Turkish RAG dataset derived from Turkish Wikipedia and CulturaX, comprising question-answer pairs and relevant passage chunks. We benchmark seven stages of the RAG pipeline—from query transformation and reranking to answer refinement—without task-specific fine-tuning. Our results show that complex methods like HyDE maximize accuracy (85%) that is considerably higher than the baseline (78.70%). Also a Pareto-optimal configuration using Cross-encoder Reranking and Context Augmentation achieves comparable performance (84.60%) with much lower cost. We further demonstrate that over-stacking generative modules can degrade performance by distorting morphological cues, whereas simple query clarification with robust reranking offers an effective solution.