Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Xu, Jerry, Wang, Justin, Leung, Joley, Gu, Jasmine
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.23299
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866917972001423360
author Xu, Jerry
Wang, Justin
Leung, Joley
Gu, Jasmine
author_facet Xu, Jerry
Wang, Justin
Leung, Joley
Gu, Jasmine
contents There are a growing number of AI applications, but none tailored specifically to help residents answer their questions about municipal budget, a topic most are interested in but few have a solid comprehension of. In this research paper, we propose GRASP, a custom AI chatbot framework which stands for Generation with Retrieval and Action System for Prompts. GRASP provides more truthful and grounded responses to user budget queries than traditional information retrieval systems like general Large Language Models (LLMs) or web searches. These improvements come from the novel combination of a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) framework ("Generation with Retrieval") and an agentic workflow ("Action System"), as well as prompt engineering techniques, the incorporation of municipal budget domain knowledge, and collaboration with local town officials to ensure response truthfulness. During testing, we found that our GRASP chatbot provided precise and accurate responses for local municipal budget queries 78% of the time, while GPT-4o and Gemini were only accurate 60% and 35% of the time, respectively. GRASP chatbots greatly reduce the time and effort needed for the general public to get an intuitive and correct understanding of their town's budget, thus fostering greater communal discourse, improving government transparency, and allowing citizens to make more informed decisions.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_23299
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle GRASP: Municipal Budget AI Chatbots for Enhancing Civic Engagement
Xu, Jerry
Wang, Justin
Leung, Joley
Gu, Jasmine
Artificial Intelligence
There are a growing number of AI applications, but none tailored specifically to help residents answer their questions about municipal budget, a topic most are interested in but few have a solid comprehension of. In this research paper, we propose GRASP, a custom AI chatbot framework which stands for Generation with Retrieval and Action System for Prompts. GRASP provides more truthful and grounded responses to user budget queries than traditional information retrieval systems like general Large Language Models (LLMs) or web searches. These improvements come from the novel combination of a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) framework ("Generation with Retrieval") and an agentic workflow ("Action System"), as well as prompt engineering techniques, the incorporation of municipal budget domain knowledge, and collaboration with local town officials to ensure response truthfulness. During testing, we found that our GRASP chatbot provided precise and accurate responses for local municipal budget queries 78% of the time, while GPT-4o and Gemini were only accurate 60% and 35% of the time, respectively. GRASP chatbots greatly reduce the time and effort needed for the general public to get an intuitive and correct understanding of their town's budget, thus fostering greater communal discourse, improving government transparency, and allowing citizens to make more informed decisions.
title GRASP: Municipal Budget AI Chatbots for Enhancing Civic Engagement
topic Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.23299