Skip to main content

Leveraging Semantic Search and LLMs for Domain-Adaptive Information Retrieval

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Information and Software Technologies (ICIST 2023)

Abstract

The rapid growth of digital information and the increasing complexity of user queries have made traditional search methods less effective in the context of business-related websites. This paper presents an innovative approach to improve the search experience across a variety of domains, particularly in the industrial sector, by integrating semantic search and conversational large language models such as GPT-3.5 into a domain-adaptive question-answering framework. Our proposed solution aims at complementing existing keyword-based approaches with the ability to capture entire questions or problems. By using all types of text, such as product manuals, documentation, advertisements, and other documents, all types of questions relevant to a website can be answered. These questions can be simple requests for product or domain knowledge, assistance in using a product, or more complex questions that may be relevant in determining the value of organizations as potential collaborators. We also introduce a mechanism for users to ask follow-up questions and to establish subject-specific communication with the search system. The results of our feasibility study show that the integration of semantic search and GPT-3.5 leads to significant improvements in the search experience, which could then translate into higher user satisfaction when querying the corporate portfolio. This research contributes to the ongoing development of advanced search technologies and has implications for a variety of industries seeking to unlock their hidden value.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 64.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 84.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    https://solr.apache.org, last accessed 2023-07-24.

  2. 2.

    https://openai.com/blog/new-and-improved-embedding-model, last accessed 2023-07-24.

  3. 3.

    https://streamlit.io, last accessed 2023-07-24.

  4. 4.

    https://haystack.deepset.ai, last accessed 2023-07-24.

  5. 5.

    https://platform.openai.com, last accessed 2023-07-24.

References

  1. Almazrouei, E., et al.: Falcon-40B: an open large language model with state-of-the-art performance (2023)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Bast, H., Buchhold, B., Haussmann, E.: Semantic search on text and knowledge bases. Found. Trends® Inf. Retrieval 10(2–3), 119–271 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1561/1500000032

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Brown, T., et al.: Language models are few-shot learners. In: Larochelle, H., Ranzato, M., Hadsell, R., Balcan, M., Lin, H. (eds.) Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, vol. 33, pp. 1877–1901. Curran Associates, Inc. (2020). https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/2020/file/1457c0d6bfcb4967418bfb8ac142f64a-Paper.pdf

  4. Cer, D., et al.: Universal sentence encoder for English. In: Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations, pp. 169–174. Association for Computational Linguistics, Brussels (2018). https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/D18-2029. https://aclanthology.org/D18-2029

  5. Devlin, J., Chang, M.W., Lee, K., Toutanova, K.: BERT: pre-training of deep bidirectional transformers for language understanding. In: Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers), pp. 4171–4186. Association for Computational Linguistics, Minneapolis (2019). https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/N19-1423. https://aclanthology.org/N19-1423

  6. Hirschberg, J., Manning, C.D.: Advances in natural language processing. Science 349(6245), 261–266 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aaa8685

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  7. Liu, Y., et al.: RoBERTa: a robustly optimized BERT pretraining approach. CoRR abs/1907.11692 (2019). http://arxiv.org/abs/1907.11692

  8. Ouyang, L., et al.: Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback. In: Koyejo, S., Mohamed, S., Agarwal, A., Belgrave, D., Cho, K., Oh, A. (eds.) Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, vol. 35, pp. 27730–27744. Curran Associates, Inc. (2022). https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/2022/file/b1efde53be364a73914f58805a001731-Paper-Conference.pdf

  9. Radford, A., Narasimhan, K., Salimans, T., Sutskever, I., et al.: Improving language understanding by generative pre-training. OpenAI Blog (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Radford, A., Wu, J., Child, R., Luan, D., Amodei, D., Sutskever, I., et al.: Language models are unsupervised multitask learners. OpenAI Blog 1(8), 9 (2019)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Raffel, C., et al.: Exploring the limits of transfer learning with a unified text-to-text transformer. J. Mach. Learn. Res. 21(140), 1–67 (2020). http://jmlr.org/papers/v21/20-074.html

  12. Reimers, N., Gurevych, I.: Sentence-BERT: sentence embeddings using Siamese BERT-networks. In: Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), pp. 3982–3992. Association for Computational Linguistics, Hong Kong (2019). https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/D19-1410. https://aclanthology.org/D19-1410

  13. Saini, B., Singh, V., Kumar, S.: Information retrieval models and searching methodologies: survey. Int. J. Adv. Found. Res. Sci. Eng. (IJAFRSE) 1, 20 (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Sanh, V., Debut, L., Chaumond, J., Wolf, T.: DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter. CoRR abs/1910.01108 (2019). http://arxiv.org/abs/1910.01108

  15. Team, M.N.: Introducing MPT-7B: a new standard for open-source, commercially usable LLMs (2023). www.mosaicml.com/blog/mpt-7b. Accessed 24 July 2023

  16. Touvron, H., et al.: LLaMA: open and efficient foundation language models (2023)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Vaswani, A., et al.: Attention is all you need. In: Guyon, I., et al. (eds.) Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, vol. 30. Curran Associates, Inc. (2017). https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/2017/file/3f5ee243547dee91fbd053c1c4a845aa-Paper.pdf

  18. Yang, Z., Dai, Z., Yang, Y., Carbonell, J.G., Salakhutdinov, R., Le, Q.V.: XLNet: generalized autoregressive pretraining for language understanding. In: Wallach, H.M., Larochelle, H., Beygelzimer, A., d’Alché-Buc, F., Fox, E.B., Garnett, R. (eds.) Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 32: NeurIPS 2019, Vancouver, BC, Canada, pp. 5754–5764 (2019)

    Google Scholar 

  19. Zhang, S., et al.: OPT: open pre-trained transformer language models (2022)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgments

This work was co-funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research under grants 13N16242 and 01IO2208E.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Falk Maoro .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2024 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this paper

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this paper

Maoro, F., Vehmeyer, B., Geierhos, M. (2024). Leveraging Semantic Search and LLMs for Domain-Adaptive Information Retrieval. In: Lopata, A., Gudonienė, D., Butkienė, R. (eds) Information and Software Technologies. ICIST 2023. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1979. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48981-5_12

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48981-5_12

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-48980-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-48981-5

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics