Build a RAG knowledge base assistant
Turn internal documents into a retrieval assistant with citations, fallback rules, and evaluation questions.
- Outcome
- A document Q&A assistant that can answer with source references.
- Task
- RAG knowledge base documents retrieval citations chatbot vector database
Workflow
- Choose a narrow document set and remove outdated files.
- Define chunking, metadata, permissions, and retrieval settings.
- Require citations and fallback when evidence is missing.
- Test with golden questions, edge cases, and hallucination checks.
Tool stack
ContentClean source documents
IndexChunking and embeddings
AnswerPrompt and citation format
EvaluateGolden questions and failure cases
Evaluation checklist
- Document freshness
- Permission boundaries
- Citation quality
- Fallback behavior
- Evaluation set and logs
Common mistakes
- Do not index everything before cleaning sources.
- Do not answer without citations for policy or support content.
- Do not skip evaluation questions.