# Advancing Academic Chatbots: Evaluation of Non Traditional Outputs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.00991 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.00991/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [G-Eval: NLG Evaluation using GPT-4 with Better Human Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16634/) (2023)
- [From Local to Global: A Graph RAG Approach to Query-Focused Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16130/) (2024)
- [A Survey on LLM-as-a-Judge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15594/) (2024)
- [Large Language Models are not Fair Evaluators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17926/) (2023)
- [SummEval: Re-evaluating Summarization Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.12626/) (2020)
- [A Survey on Knowledge Graphs: Representation, Acquisition and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.00388/) (2020)
- [The NarrativeQA Reading Comprehension Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.07040/) (2017)
- [The Instruction Hierarchy: Training LLMs to Prioritize Privileged Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13208/) (2024)
- [From Louvain to Leiden: guaranteeing well-connected communities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.08473/) (2018)
- [Persistent Anti-Muslim Bias in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.05783/) (2021)
- [Better Zero-Shot Reasoning with Role-Play Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07702/) (2023)
- [RAG vs. GraphRAG: A Systematic Evaluation and Key Insights](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11371/) (2025)
- [The Challenges of Evaluating LLM Applications: An Analysis of Automated, Human, and LLM-Based Approaches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03339/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Most evaluations of large language models focus on standard tasks such as factual question answering or short summarization. This research expands that scope in two directions: first, by comparing two retrieval strategies, Graph RAG, structured knowledge-graph based, and Advanced RAG, hybrid keyword-semantic search, for QA; and second, by evaluating whether LLMs can generate high quality non-traditional academic outputs, specifically slide decks and podcast scripts. We implemented a prototype combining Meta's LLaMA 3 70B open weight and OpenAI's GPT 4o mini API based. QA performance was evaluated using both human ratings across eleven quality dimensions and large language model judges for scalable cross validation. GPT 4o mini with Advanced RAG produced the most accurate responses. Graph RAG offered limited improvements and led to more hallucinations, partly due to its structural complexity and manual setup. Slide and podcast generation was tested with document grounded retrieval. GPT 4o mini again performed best, though LLaMA 3 showed promise in narrative coherence. Human reviewers were crucial for detecting layout and stylistic flaws, highlighting the need for combined human LLM evaluation in assessing emerging academic outputs.
