Smart Campus Assistant using RAG-based AI

Abstract

This paper presents the design and implementation of intelligent chatbots using Retrieval-Augmented Generation architecture to derive accurate, context-based responses from domain-specific knowledge sources such as PDFs and CSV files. The proposed system integrates information retrieval mechanisms with large language models to overcome crucial limitations of traditional chatbots: hallucination, knowledge cut-off, and inability to access private organizational data. The proposed architecture uses a six-stage pipeline consisting of document ingestion, text splitting, and embedding generation with sentence transformers, semantic retrieval, and response generation via Large Language Models (LLMs). By preprocessing the PDF and CSV documents using a RecursiveCharacterTextSplitter and converting them into 384-dimensional semantic embeddings, the system works via a similarity-based retrieval of document chunks. For implementation, the LlamaIndex framework was used for data indexing and query orchestration, and HuggingFace Transformers for language modeling. Experimental validation conducted on the smart campus chatbot system demonstrated significant improvements in the accuracy, relevance and transparency of responses across education, student services, and administrative support domains compared with a standalone language model. Because of its modular design, it supports a wide range of domain-specific topics without the combinatorial costs of re-training. This is another important application for systems that require regular updates and accurate information. Overall, the proposed framework provides a simple and practical approach for easily implementing domain-aware chatbots.