journal article·2025-04-11Open access

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) Chatbots for Education: A Survey of Applications

Jakub Swacha, Michał Gracel

Applied Sciences· Volume 15· Issue 8

Abstract

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) overcomes the main barrier for the adoption of LLM-based chatbots in education: hallucinations. The uncomplicated architecture of RAG chatbots makes it relatively easy to implement chatbots that serve specific purposes and thus are capable of addressing various needs in the educational domain. With five years having passed since the introduction of RAG, the time has come to check the progress attained in its adoption in education. This paper identifies 47 papers dedicated to RAG chatbots’ uses for various kinds of educational purposes, which are analyzed in terms of their character, the target of the support provided by the chatbots, the thematic scope of the knowledge accessible via the chatbots, the underlying large language model, and the character of their evaluation.
Source: crossref · Quality: baseline

Research context

OpenAlex topics: AI in Service Interactions · Topic Modeling · Recommender Systems and Techniques

SciVX discovery tags are terminology-based. OpenAlex topics are source-provided classifications.

Affiliations

Department of Information Technology in Management, University of Szczecin, 71-004 Szczecin, Poland

References (90)

Show source-provided references
1. Dialogue in education10.22323/2.07010304 ↗
2. Roumeliotis, K.I., and Tselikas, N.D. (2023). ChatGPT and Open-AI Models: A Preliminary Review. Future Internet, 15.10.3390/fi15060192 ↗
3. Han, J., Yoo, H., Myung, J., Kim, M., Lee, T.Y., Ahn, S.Y., Oh, A., and Answer, A.N. (2023, January 10–16). Exploring Student-ChatGPT Dialogue in EFL Writing Education. Proceedings of the Thirty-Seventh Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems. Neural Information Processing Systems Foundation, New Orleans, LA, USA.
4. Retrieval-augmented generation for knowledge-intensive NLP tasks
5. Survey of hallucination in natural language generation10.1145/3571730 ↗
6. Zhu, W., Xiong, H., Cheng, X., Cui, L., Dou, Z., Dong, J., Pang, S., Wang, L., Kong, L., and Chen, Z. Evaluation of Retrieval-Augmented Generation: A Survey. Proceedings of the Big Data.
7. Gupta, S., Ranjan, R., and Singh, S.N. (2024). A Comprehensive Survey of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG): Evolution, Current Landscape and Future Directions. arXiv.
8. Zhao, P., Zhang, H., Yu, Q., Wang, Z., Geng, Y., Fu, F., Yang, L., Zhang, W., Jiang, J., and Cui, B. (2024). Retrieval-Augmented Generation for AI-Generated Content: A Survey. arXiv.
9. Systematic Analysis of Retrieval-Augmented Generation-Based LLMs for Medical Chatbot Applications10.3390/make6040116 ↗
10. Rediscovering the use of chatbots in education: A systematic literature review10.1002/cae.22326 ↗
11. Wollny, S., Schneider, J., Di Mitri, D., Weidlich, J., Rittberger, M., and Drachsler, H. (2021). Are We There Yet?—A Systematic Literature Review on Chatbots in Education. Front. Artif. Intell., 4.10.3389/frai.2021.654924 ↗
12. Chatbots applications in education: A systematic review10.1016/j.caeai.2021.100033 ↗
13. Beyond Chatbots: Enhancing Luxembourgish Language Learning Through Multi-Agent Systems and Large Language Model
14. ChatGPT versus a customized AI chatbot (Anatbuddy) for anatomy education: A comparative pilot study10.1002/ase.2502 ↗
15. Design, architecture and safety evaluation of an AI chatbot for an educational approach to health promotion in chronic medical conditions
16. Spencer, S.N. (2024, January 3–6). Embodied AI-Guided Interactive Digital Teachers for Education. Proceedings of the SIGGRAPH Asia 2024 Educator’s Forum, SA 2024, Tokyo, Japan.
17. Babic, S., Car, Z., Cicin-Sain, M., Cisic, D., Ergovic, P., Grbac, T.G., Gradisnik, V., Gros, S., Jokic, A., and Jovic, A. (2024, January 20–24). Enhancing Programming Education with Open-Source Generative AI Chatbots. Proceedings of the 47th ICT and Electronics Convention, MIPRO 2024, Opatija, Croatia.
18. Thway, M., Recatala-Gomez, J., Lim, F.S., Hippalgaonkar, K., and Ng, L.W. (2024). Harnessing GenAI for Higher Education: A Study of a Retrieval Augmented Generation Chatbot’s Impact on Human Learning. arXiv.
19. Abraham, S., Ewards, V., and Terence, S. (2024, January 5–7). Interactive Video Virtual Assistant Framework with Retrieval Augmented Generation for E-Learning. Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Applied Artificial Intelligence and Computing, ICAAIC 2024, Salem, India.10.1109/ICAAIC60222.2024.10575255 ↗
20. Jiang, Y., Shao, Y., Ma, D., Semnani, S.J., and Lam, M.S. (2024). Into the unknown unknowns: Engaged human learning through participation in language model agent conversations. arXiv.10.18653/v1/2024.emnlp-main.554 ↗
21. An LLM-Driven Chatbot in Higher Education for Databases and Information Systems10.1109/TE.2024.3467912 ↗
22. Levonian, Z., Li, C., Zhu, W., Gade, A., Henkel, O., Postle, M.E., and Xing, W. (2023, January 15). Retrieval-augmented Generation to Improve Math Question-Answering: Trade-offs Between Groundedness and Human Preference. Proceedings of the NeurIPS’23 Workshop: Generative AI for Education (GAIED), New Orleans, LA, USA.
23. Scalable Mentoring Support with a Large Language Model Chatbot
24. Al Ghadban, Y., Lu, H.Y., Adavi, U., Sharma, A., Gara, S., Das, N., Kumar, B., John, R., Devarsetty, P., and Hirst, J.E. (2023, January 15). Transforming Healthcare Education: Harnessing Large Language Models for Frontline Health Worker Capacity Building using Retrieval-Augmented Generation. Proceedings of the NeurIPS’23 Workshop: Generative AI for Education (GAIED), New Orleans, LA, USA.10.1101/2023.12.15.23300009 ↗
25. AI-driven chatbot implementation for enhancing customer service in higher education: A case study from Universitas Negeri Semarang
26. Saad, M., and Qawaqneh, Z. (2024, January 4–6). Closed Domain Question-Answering Techniques in an Institutional Chatbot. Proceedings of the International Conference on Electrical, Computer, Communications and Mechatronics Engineering, ICECCME 2024, Male, Maldives.10.1109/ICECCME62383.2024.10796881 ↗
27. Olawore, K., McTear, M., and Bi, Y. (2024, January 4–5). Development and Evaluation of a University Chatbot Using Deep Learning: A RAG-Based Approach. Proceedings of the CONVERSATIONS 2024—The 8th International Workshop on Chatbots and Human-Centred AI, Thessaloniki, Greece.
28. Facilitating university admission using a chatbot based on large language models with retrieval-augmented generation
29. Neupane, S., Hossain, E., Keith, J., Tripathi, H., Ghiasi, F., Golilarz, N.A., Amirlatifi, A., Mittal, S., and Rahimi, S. (2024). From Questions to Insightful Answers: Building an Informed Chatbot for University Resources. arXiv.10.1109/FIE61694.2024.10892994 ↗
30. Bimberg, R., and Quibeldey-Cirkel, K. (2024, January 1–3). AI assistants in teaching and learning: Compliant with data protection regulations and free from hallucinations!. Proceedings of the EDULEARN24, IATED, 2024, Palma, Spain.10.21125/edulearn.2024.1014 ↗
31. Hicke, Y., Agarwal, A., Ma, Q., and Denny, P. (2023). AI-TA: Towards an Intelligent Question-Answer Teaching Assistant Using Open-Source LLMs. arXiv.
32. Ask NAEP: A Generative AI Assistant for Querying Assessment Information
33. Oldensand, V. (2024). Developing a RAG System for Automatic Question Generation: A Case Study in the Tanzanian Education Sector. [Master’s Thesis, KTH Royal Institute of Technology].
34. Klymkowsky, M., and Cooper, M.M. (2024). The end of multiple choice tests: Using AI to enhance assessment. arXiv.
35. Saha, B., and Saha, U. (2024, January 10–11). Enhancing International Graduate Student Experience through AI-Driven Support Systems: A LLM and RAG-Based Approach. Proceedings of the 2024 International Conference on Data Science and Its Applications, ICoDSA 2024, Kuta, Bali, Indonesia.10.1109/ICoDSA62899.2024.10651944 ↗
36. Wong, L. (2024). Gaita: A RAG System for Personalized Computer Science Education. [Master’s Thesis, Johns Hopkins University].10.35542/osf.io/97nmg ↗
37. Amarnath, N., and Nagarajan, R. (2024, January 15–17). An Intelligent Retrieval Augmented Generation Chatbot for Contextually-Aware Conversations to Guide High School Students. Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Sustainable Expert Systems, ICSES 2024, Lekhnath, Nepal.10.1109/ICSES63445.2024.10762977 ↗
38. Rao, J., and Lin, J. (2024, January 13). RAMO: Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Enhancing MOOCs Recommendations. Proceedings of the Educational Datamining ’24 Human-Centric eXplainable AI in Education and Leveraging Large Language Models for Next-Generation Educational Technologies Workshop Joint Proceedings, Atlanta, GA, USA. CEUR-WS.
39. VizChat: Enhancing Learning Analytics Dashboards with Contextualised Explanations Using Multimodal Generative AI Chatbots
40. Forootani, A., Aliabadi, D., and Thraen, D. (2024). Bio-Eng-LMM AI Assist chatbot: A Comprehensive Tool for Research and Education. arXiv.
41. Recio-Garcia, J.A., Orozco-del Castillo, M.G., and Bridge, D. (2024, January 1–4). CBR-RAG: Case-Based Reasoning for Retrieval Augmented Generation in LLMs for Legal Question Answering. Proceedings of the Case-Based Reasoning Research and Development, Merida, Mexico.
42. ChatDoctor: A Medical Chat Model Fine-Tuned on a Large Language Model Meta-AI (LLaMA) Using Medical Domain Knowledge
43. Cui, J., Ning, M., Li, Z., Chen, B., Yan, Y., Li, H., Ling, B., Tian, Y., and Yuan, L. (2024). Chatlaw: A Multi-Agent Collaborative Legal Assistant with Knowledge Graph Enhanced Mixture-of-Experts Large Language Model. arXiv.
44. Dean, M., Bond, R., McTear, M., and Mulvenna, M. (2023, January 7–8). ChatPapers: An AI Chatbot for Interacting with Academic Research. Proceedings of the 2023 31st Irish Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science, AICS 2023, Letterkenny, Ireland.10.1109/AICS60730.2023.10470521 ↗
45. Bhavani Peri, S., Santhanalakshmi, S., and Radha, R. (2024, January 21–22). Chatbot to chat with medical books using Retrieval-Augmented Generation Model. Proceedings of the NKCon 2024—3rd Edition of IEEE NKSS’s Flagship International Conference: Digital Transformation: Unleashing the Power of Information, Bagalkot, India.10.1109/NKCon62728.2024.10774900 ↗
46. Maryamah, M., Irfani, M., Tri Raharjo, E., Rahmi, N., Ghani, M., and Raharjana, I. (March, January 28). Chatbots in Academia: A Retrieval-Augmented Generation Approach for Improved Efficient Information Access. Proceedings of the KST 2024—16th International Conference on Knowledge and Smart Technology, Krabi, Thailand.10.1109/KST61284.2024.10499652 ↗
47. Richard, R., Veemaraj, E., Thomas, J., Mathew, J., Stephen, C., and Koshy, R. (2024, January 21–23). A Client-Server Based Educational Chatbot for Academic Institutions. Proceedings of the 2024 4th International Conference on Intelligent Technologies, CONIT 2024, Bangalore, India.10.1109/CONIT61985.2024.10627567 ↗
48. Schlippe, T., Cheng, E.C.K., and Wang, T. (2024, January 29–31). Comparing the Performance of LLMs in RAG-Based Question-Answering: A Case Study in Computer Science Literature. Proceedings of the Artificial Intelligence in Education Technologies: New Development and Innovative Practices, Barcelona, Spain.
49. Burgan, C., Kowalski, J., and Liao, W. (2024). Developing a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) Chatbot App Using Adaptive Large Language Models (LLM) and LangChain Framework. Proc. West Va. Acad. Sci., 96.10.55632/pwvas.v96i1.1068 ↗
50. Development of a liver disease-specific large language model chat interface using retrieval-augmented generation10.1097/HEP.0000000000000834 ↗
51. Enhancing textual textbook question answering with large language models and retrieval augmented generation10.1016/j.patcog.2024.111332 ↗
52. Miao, J., Thongprayoon, C., Suppadungsuk, S., Garcia Valencia, O.A., and Cheungpasitporn, W. (2024). Integrating Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Large Language Models in Nephrology: Advancing Practical Applications. Medicina, 60.10.3390/medicina60030445 ↗
53. Wölfel, M., Shirzad, M., Reich, A., and Anderer, K. (2024). Knowledge-Based and Generative-AI-Driven Pedagogical Conversational Agents: A Comparative Study of Grice’s Cooperative Principles and Trust. Big Data Cogn. Comput., 8.10.3390/bdcc8010002 ↗
54. Let us not squander the affordances of LLMS for the sake of expedience: Using retrieval augmented generative AI chatbots to support and evaluate student reasoning10.1021/acs.jchemed.4c00765 ↗
55. Amri, S., Bani, S., and Bani, R. (2024, January 18–19). Moroccan legal assistant Enhanced by Retrieval-Augmented Generation Technology. Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Networking, Intelligent Systems and Security, NISS 2024, Meknes, Morocco. ACM International Conference Proceeding Series.10.1145/3659677.3659737 ↗
56. Lála, J., O’Donoghue, O., Shtedritski, A., Cox, S., Rodriques, S.G., and White, A.D. (2023). PaperQA: Retrieval-Augmented Generative Agent for Scientific Research. arXiv.
57. Potential for GPT Technology to Optimize Future Clinical Decision-Making Using Retrieval-Augmented Generation10.1007/s10439-023-03327-6 ↗
58. Sree, Y., Sathvik, A., Hema Akshit, D., Kumar, O., and Pranav Rao, B. (2024, January 23). Retrieval-Augmented Generation Based Large Language Model Chatbot for Improving Diagnosis for Physical and Mental Health. Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Electrical, Control and Instrumentation Engineering, ICECIE 2024, Pattaya, Thailand.10.1109/ICECIE63774.2024.10815693 ↗
59. Habib, M., Amin, S., Oqba, M., Jaipal, S., Khan, M., and Samad, A. (2024, January 19–21). TaxTajweez: A Large Language Model-based Chatbot for Income Tax Information In Pakistan Using Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). Proceedings of the 37th International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference, FLAIRS 2024, Miramar Beach, FL, USA.10.32473/flairs.37.1.135648 ↗
60. Benchmarking Large Language Models in Retrieval-Augmented Generation
61. Aletras, N., and Clercq, O.D. (2024, January 17–22). RAGAs: Automated Evaluation of Retrieval Augmented Generation. Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, EACL 2024—System Demonstrations, St. Julians, Malta.
62. Arai, K. (2024). An Intrinsic Framework of Information Retrieval Evaluation Measures. Proceedings of the Intelligent Systems and Applications, Springer.
63. Pennington, J., Socher, R., and Manning, C. (2014, January 25–29). GloVe: Global Vectors for Word Representation. Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), Doha, Qatar.10.3115/v1/D14-1162 ↗
64. Research on Text Similarity Measurement Hybrid Algorithm with Term Semantic Information and TF-IDF Method10.1155/2022/7923262 ↗
65. Zhong, W., Cui, R., Guo, Y., Liang, Y., Lu, S., Wang, Y., Saied, A., Chen, W., and Duan, N. (2024, January 16–21). AGIEval: A Human-Centric Benchmark for Evaluating Foundation Models. Proceedings of the Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2024, Mexico City, Mexico.10.18653/v1/2024.findings-naacl.149 ↗
66. Aridoss, M., Bisht, K.S., and Natarajan, A.K. (2024). Comprehensive Analysis of Falcon 7B: A State-of-the-Art Generative Large Language Model. Generative AI: Current Trends and Applications, Springer.10.1007/978-981-97-8460-8_8 ↗
67. Touvron, H., Martin, L., Stone, K., Albert, P., Almahairi, A., Babaei, Y., Bashlykov, N., Batra, S., Bhargava, P., and Bhosale, S. (2023). Llama 2: Open foundation and fine-tuned chat models. arXiv.
68. Grice, H.P. (1991). Studies in the Way of Words, Harvard University Press.
69. Koubaa, A. (2023). GPT-4 vs. GPT-3.5: A Concise Showdown. Preprints.10.36227/techrxiv.22312330.v2 ↗
70. Chiesurin, S., Dimakopoulos, D., Sobrevilla Cabezudo, M.A., Eshghi, A., Papaioannou, I., Rieser, V., and Konstas, I. (2023). The Dangers of trusting Stochastic Parrots: Faithfulness and Trust in Open-domain Conversational Question Answering. arXiv.10.18653/v1/2023.findings-acl.60 ↗
71. Barrault, L., Bojar, O., Bougares, F., Chatterjee, R., Costa-jussa, M.R., Federmann, C., Fishel, M., Fraser, A., Freitag, M., and Graham, Y. (2021, January 10–11). A Fine-Grained Analysis of BERTScore. Proceedings of the Sixth Conference on Machine Translation, Online.
72. Sellam, T., Das, D., and Parikh, A. (2020). BLEURT: Learning Robust Metrics for Text Generation. arXiv.10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.704 ↗
73. Lin, C.Y. (2004, January 25–26). ROUGE: A Package for Automatic Evaluation of Summaries. Proceedings of the Text Summarization Branches Out, Barcelona, Spain.
74. Modification of the Coleman readability formulas10.1080/10862967609547193 ↗
75. Evaluating text complexity and Flesch-Kincaid grade level
76. Jiang, A.Q., Sablayrolles, A., Mensch, A., Bamford, C., Chaplot, D.S., de las Casas, D., Bressand, F., Lengyel, G., Lample, G., and Saulnier, L. (2023). Mistral 7B. arXiv.
77. Lian, W., Goodson, B., Wang, G., Pentland, E., Cook, A., and Vong, C. (2025, April 04). “Teknium”. MistralOrca: Mistral-7B Model Instruct-Tuned on Filtered OpenOrcaV1 GPT-4 Dataset. Available online: https://huggingface.co/Open-Orca/Mistral-7B-OpenOrca.
78. Tunstall, L., Beeching, E., Lambert, N., Rajani, N., Rasul, K., Belkada, Y., Huang, S., von Werra, L., Fourrier, C., and Habib, N. (2023). Zephyr: Direct Distillation of LM Alignment. arXiv.
79. Tunstall, L., Beeching, E., Lambert, N., Rajani, N., Rasul, K., Belkada, Y., Huang, S., von Werra, L., Fourrier, C., and Habib, N. (2025, April 04). Zephyr 7B Beta. Available online: https://huggingface.co/HuggingFaceH4/zephyr-7b-beta.
80. Exploring the relationship between technology acceptance model and usability test10.1007/s10799-013-0162-0 ↗
81. The system usability scale: Past, present, and future10.1080/10447318.2018.1455307 ↗
82. Perceived usability evaluation of educational technology using the System Usability Scale (SUS): A systematic review10.1080/15391523.2020.1867938 ↗
83. Montella, R., De Vita, C.G., Mellone, G., Di Luccio, D., Maskeliūnas, R., Damaševičius, R., Blažauskas, T., Queirós, R., Kosta, S., and Swacha, J. (2024, January 19). Re-Assessing the Usability of FGPE Programming Learning Environment with SUS and UMUX. Proceedings of the Information Systems Education Conference, Virtual.
84. Liu, R., Zenke, C., Liu, C., Holmes, A., Thornton, P., and Malan, D.J. (2024, January 20–23). Teaching CS50 with AI: Leveraging Generative Artificial Intelligence in Computer Science Education. Proceedings of the 55th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, Portland, OR, USA.10.1145/3626252.3630938 ↗
85. Wang, Y., Hernandez, A.G., Kyslyi, R., and Kersting, N. (2024). Evaluating Quality of Answers for Retrieval-Augmented Generation: A Strong LLM Is All You Need. arXiv.
86. Hobert, S. (2019). How Are You, Chatbot? Evaluating Chatbots in Educational Settings—Results of a Literature Review. DELFI 2019, Gesellschaft für Informatik e.V.
87. Amugongo, L.M., Mascheroni, P., Brooks, S.G., Doering, S., and Seidel, J. (2025, April 04). Retrieval Augmented Generation for Large Language Models in Healthcare: A Systematic Review. Available online: https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202407.0876/v1.10.20944/preprints202407.0876.v1 ↗
88. Raihan, N., Siddiq, M.L., Santos, J.C., and Zampieri, M. (March, January 26). Large Language Models in Computer Science Education: A Systematic Literature Review. Proceedings of the 56th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, Pittsburgh, PA, USA.
89. Brown, G.T.L., and Abdulnabi, H.H.A. (2017). Evaluating the Quality of Higher Education Instructor-Constructed Multiple-Choice Tests: Impact on Student Grades. Front. Educ., 2.10.3389/feduc.2017.00024 ↗
90. McCloskey, M. (2025, April 04). Turn User Goals into Task Scenarios for Usability Testing. Available online: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/task-scenarios-usability-testing/.