Recursive Journal of Informatics
Vol. 4 No. 2 (2026): September 2026

ITEBIS PGRI Dewantara Academic Service Chatbot Based on IndoBERT and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)

Syaiful Imron (Institut Teknologi Dan Bisnis PGRI Dewantara Jombang)
Arbiati Faizah (Institut Teknologi dan Bisnis PGRI Dewantara Jombang)
Sugianto (Institut Teknologi dan Bisnis PGRI Dewantara Jombang)



Article Info

Publish Date
30 Sep 2026

Abstract

Abstract. Academic administrative services must stay responsive beyond regular hours, yet repetitive student inquiries add to staff workload. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) with a fine-tuned language model offers a way to automate accurate, round the clock responses in Indonesian. Purpose: This study develops a prototype academic-service chatbot for ITEBIS PGRI Dewantara Jombang, integrating a fine-tuned IndoBERT model with RAG architecture to address limited-service hours and repetitive handling of routine student inquiries. Methods/Study design/approach: The system used 2,517 SQuAD-format question-answer pairs, split into 72% training (1,812), 8% validation (201), and 20% test (504). IndoBERT (indobenchmark/indobert-base-p1) was fine-tuned as an extractive reader for five epochs (batch size 8, learning rate 3 × 10⁻⁵) with early stopping, then converted to ONNX format and INT8-quantized for CPU-based local deployment. The prototype separates a Laravel web interface from a FastAPI backend running the RAG pipeline, retrieving passages from a MySQL knowledge base via FAISS search (top-k = 5, min score 0.30) and catching frequent query-answer pairs in Redis to cut redundant database access and inference latency. Evaluation used black-box testing across five scenarios. Result/Findings: On the 504-pair test set, the model achieved an Exact Match of 71.32% and an F1-Score of 86.63%. All five black-box scenarios passed, including the system’s ability to give database-grounded responses within the tested scenarios rather than fabricated answers, though retrieval for categories with fewer passages (e.g., finance) was more sensitive to question phrasing Novelty/Originality/Value: The novelty lies not in any single element but in combining four components: a fine-tuned IndoBERT reader for Indonesian, an academic-domain RAG architecture, a fully functional end-to-end web prototype rather than model evaluation alone, and an ONNX INT8-quantized reader paired with a Redis caching layer that jointly reduce inference latency and database load a combination not jointly addressed in prior IndoBERT or RAG-based chatbot studies.

Copyrights © 2026






Journal Info

Abbrev

rji

Publisher

Subject

Computer Science & IT

Description

Recursive Journal of Informatics published by the Department of Computer Science, Universitas Negeri Semarang, a journal of Information Systems and Information Technology which includes scholarly writings on pure research and applied research in the field of information systems and information ...