I’m implementing a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system for a chatbot that handles a variety of user queries. While RAG is primarily designed to provide informative responses by retrieving relevant documents and generating responses using a language model (LLM), I want to handle certain types of queries, like greetings and polite exchanges, without resorting to the LLM for efficiency and control.

Specifically, I want to manage greet-type questions such as “Hello,” “How are you?”, “Good morning,” etc. These questions are often formulaic and don’t require the deep contextual understanding that more complex questions might. Relying on the LLM for these could be inefficient and overkill.

Is it possible to create a chatbot-like greeting exchange system without an LLM?