Bridging Language Gaps with Adaptive RAG: Improving Indonesian Language Question Answering

Question Answering (QA) has seen significant improvements with the advancement of machine learning models, further studies enhanced this question answering system by retrieving external information, called Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to produce more accurate and informative answers. However, these state-of-the-art-performance is predominantly in English language. To address this gap we made an effort of bridging language gaps by incorporating Adaptive RAG system to Indonesian language. Adaptive RAG system integrates a classifier whose task is to distinguish the question complexity, which in turn determines the strategy for answering the question. To overcome the limited availability of Indonesian language dataset, our study employs machine translation as data augmentation approach. Experiments show reliable question complexity classifier; however, we observed significant inconsistencies in multi-retrieval answering strategy which negatively impacted the overall evaluation when this strategy was applied. These findings highlight both the promise and challenges of question answering in low-resource language suggesting directions for future improvement.

William Christian, Daniel Adamlu, Adrian Yu, Derwin Suhartono · 2025