How good are humans at writing and judging responses in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) scenarios? To answer this question, we investigate the efficacy of crowdsourcing for RAG through two complementary studies: response writing and response utility judgment. We present the Crowd RAG Corpus 2025 (CrowdRAG-25), which consists of 903 human-written and 903 LLM-generated responses for the 301 topics of the TREC RAG'24 track, across the three discourse styles 'bulleted list', éssay', and ñews'. For a selection of 65 topics, the corpus further contains 47,320 pairwise human judgments and 10,556 pairwise LLM judgments across seven utility dimensions (e.g., coverage and coherence). Our analyses give insights into human writing behavior for RAG and the viability of crowdsourcing for RAG evaluation. Human pairwise judgments provide reliable and cost-effective results compared to LLM-based pairwise or human/LLM-based pointwise judgments, as well as automated comparisons with human-written reference responses. All our data and tools are freely available.
View on arXiv@article{gienapp2025_2504.15689,
title={ The Viability of Crowdsourcing for RAG Evaluation },
author={ Lukas Gienapp and Tim Hagen and Maik Fröbe and Matthias Hagen and Benno Stein and Martin Potthast and Harrisen Scells },
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.15689},
year={ 2025 }
}