Part 1-3: From Raw Health Text to a Working Retrieval Pipeline

A first-year undergraduate student in Artificial Intelligence Engineering is building a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) project from scratch, documenting the process in a series of blog posts. In the first three parts, the student implemented a pipeline that converts raw health text into structured data, chunks it, generates embeddings, and stores them in a Chroma vector store for retrieval. The project, called health-rag-assistant, is available on GitHub.

I'm a first-year undergraduate student in Artificial Intelligence Engineering, and this summer I'm building a small RAG Retrieval-Augmented Generation project from scratch to learn how these systems actually work under the hood — not just by calling an API, but by building the pipeline piece by piece. This is a log of the first three parts of that journey. Part 1: Understanding the Building Blocks Before writing any real project code, I spent time understanding the core ideas behind RAG: - Calling an LLM API : sending a prompt programmatically and getting a response back. I used the Gemini API for this. llm test.py - Embeddings : the idea that text can be converted into numerical vectors, where semantically similar sentences end up close to each other in vector space. I tested this with a handful of sentences using sentence-transformers and computed cosine similarity between them — it was satisfying to see related sentences actually cluster together numerically. embedding test.py - Why not just dump everything into the LLM? : context windows are limited, it's expensive, and irrelevant information can actually hurt answer quality rather than help it. - Vector databases : conceptually, tools like Chroma or FAISS solve the problem of searching through large numbers of embeddings quickly to find the most relevant ones. No heavy coding in Part 1 — mostly small test scripts to confirm I understood each piece before combining them. Part 2: Collecting and Preparing Real Data With the concepts in place, Part 2 was about getting real data ready for retrieval: - Data collection : I gathered short health topic descriptions e.g. diabetes, epilepsy and saved them as structured JSON records, each with a source and text field. Keeping the source attached to each record matters — it means the system can eventually point back to where an answer came from. data/health data.json - Chunking : I wrote a script to split each record's text into smaller, paragraph-level pieces while keeping the original source attached to every chunk. Since I intentionally kept the raw text short for this first test run, most entries ended up as a single chunk each — which is fine for now, since the goal was to validate the pipeline, not build a large dataset yet. - Why chunk at all? : embedding models represent short, focused pieces of text more accurately than long documents. Splitting text into meaningful chunks is what makes retrieval actually useful later. Part 3: Setting Up the Vector Store and First Retrieval With chunked, source-tagged data ready, Part 3 turned that data into something actually searchable: - Vector store setup : installed and configured Chroma, then embedded every chunk from Part 2 and stored it alongside its text and source metadata. embed and store.py - First retrieval test : wrote a query script, asked a sample question, and retrieved the most similar chunks from the vector store. The results were reasonable given how small and short the dataset still is — a good early sign that the pipeline itself works end to end. retrieval test.py - A note on limitations : since the dataset is intentionally tiny at this stage, retrieval quality is limited. That's expected, and it'll improve as the dataset grows in later parts. What's Next At this point I have a full if small-scale pipeline: raw text → structured data → chunks → embeddings → retrieval. The next step is connecting retrieval to actual answer generation — feeding retrieved chunks into the LLM as context so it can answer health questions grounded in real source material. 👉 Code for this project: health-rag-assistant https://github.com/chewiessean/health-rag-assistant Follow along as I build this project part by part — code on GitHub, progress here on Dev.to.