Shahul Es


2024

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RAGAs: Automated Evaluation of Retrieval Augmented Generation
Shahul Es | Jithin James | Luis Espinosa Anke | Steven Schockaert
Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations

We introduce RAGAs (Retrieval Augmented Generation Assessment), a framework for reference-free evaluation of Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines. RAGAs is available at [https://github.com/explodinggradients/ragas]. RAG systems are composed of a retrieval and an LLM based generation module. They provide LLMs with knowledge from a reference textual database, enabling them to act as a natural language layer between a user and textual databases, thus reducing the risk of hallucinations. Evaluating RAG architectures is challenging due to several dimensions to consider: the ability of the retrieval system to identify relevant and focused context passages, the ability of the LLM to exploit such passages faithfully, and the quality of the generation itself. With RAGAs, we introduce a suite of metrics that can evaluate these different dimensions without relying on ground truth human annotations. We posit that such a framework can contribute crucially to faster evaluation cycles of RAG architectures, which is especially important given the fast adoption of LLMs.