Building a Local News RAG: The Quest for Trustworthiness
Session Abstract
We will show you how we build a local newspaper rag and all the problems that came along the way. From trustworthiness to customer wishes, search optimization and generation problems. Local villages, that LLMs know nothing about, content that is semantically the same and outdated information are only a part of the journey we made.
Session Description
Building a RAG system for a local newspaper is a high-stakes challenge where “hallucinations” aren’t just bugs—they are threats to the brand’s main currency: trust. In this session, we share our unfiltered journey of moving beyond “clean” documentation into the messy reality of local news.
We’ll dive into the “Long Tail of Locality,” exploring how to handle hyper-local contexts (villages and regional politics) that LLMs have nearly no knowledge of. We will discuss the problem of semantic collisions—where standard hybrid search fails to distinguish between dozens of nearly identical weekly football reports—and how we navigate complex customer expectations and unclear usage patterns.
From the architectural nightmare of structuring legacy news data to the ongoing battle for factual reliability, this is a talk about what worked, what we still haven’t fixed, and the hard lessons learned when “state-of-the-art” AI meets the local beat.
