Research Assistant
University of Illinois Springfield
Jul 2024 - Dec 2024 (6 months)
Prototyped a RAG-based pipeline for financial document retrieval and question-answering using LLMs, evaluated against SEC filing datasets as part of graduate research in applied NLP
• Prototyped a RAG pipeline using LlamaIndex 0.10.x and ChromaDB to retrieve and answer questions over SEC filings (10-K, 10-Q, 8-K), achieving Recall@K of 0.81–0.85 against a BM25 keyword search baseline
• Evaluated embedding strategies using text-embedding-ada-002 across the FinanceBench dataset (~4,500 QA pairs), benchmarking Faithfulness scores of 0.86–0.92 and Answer Relevancy of 0.78–0.84
• Investigated LLM fallback behavior by integrating gpt-3.5-turbo as primary and Phi-3-mini as local fallback, documenting latency and accuracy tradeoffs across 150+ test