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.

We present Deep Search DocQA. This application enables information extraction from documents via a question-answering conversational assistant. The system integrates several technologies from different AI disciplines consisting of document conversion to machine-readable format (via computer vision), finding relevant data (via natural language processing), and formulating an eloquent response (via large language models). Users can explore over 10,000 Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) disclosure reports from over 2000 corporations. The Deep Search platform can be accessed at: https://ds4sd.github.io.