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Main Authors: Peimani, Elham, Singh, Gurpreet, Mahyavanshi, Nisarg, Arora, Aman, Shaikh, Awais
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.17075
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author Peimani, Elham
Singh, Gurpreet
Mahyavanshi, Nisarg
Arora, Aman
Shaikh, Awais
author_facet Peimani, Elham
Singh, Gurpreet
Mahyavanshi, Nisarg
Arora, Aman
Shaikh, Awais
contents Retrieving semantically relevant documents in niche domains poses significant challenges for traditional TF-IDF-based systems, often resulting in low similarity scores and suboptimal retrieval performance. This paper addresses these challenges by introducing an iterative and semi-automated query refinement methodology tailored to Humber College's career services webpages. Initially, generic queries related to interview preparation yield low top-document similarities (approximately 0.2--0.3). To enhance retrieval effectiveness, we implement a two-fold approach: first, domain-aware query refinement by incorporating specialized terms such as resources-online-learning, student-online-services, and career-advising; second, the integration of structured educational descriptors like "online resume and interview improvement tools." Additionally, we automate the extraction of domain-specific keywords from top-ranked documents to suggest relevant terms for query expansion. Through experiments conducted on five baseline queries, our semi-automated iterative refinement process elevates the average top similarity score from approximately 0.18 to 0.42, marking a substantial improvement in retrieval performance. The implementation details, including reproducible code and experimental setups, are made available in our GitHub repositories \url{https://github.com/Elipei88/HumberChatbotBackend} and \url{https://github.com/Nisarg851/HumberChatbot}. We also discuss the limitations of our approach and propose future directions, including the integration of advanced neural retrieval models.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_17075
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Iterative NLP Query Refinement for Enhancing Domain-Specific Information Retrieval: A Case Study in Career Services
Peimani, Elham
Singh, Gurpreet
Mahyavanshi, Nisarg
Arora, Aman
Shaikh, Awais
Information Retrieval
Computation and Language
I.7.3; H.3.3
Retrieving semantically relevant documents in niche domains poses significant challenges for traditional TF-IDF-based systems, often resulting in low similarity scores and suboptimal retrieval performance. This paper addresses these challenges by introducing an iterative and semi-automated query refinement methodology tailored to Humber College's career services webpages. Initially, generic queries related to interview preparation yield low top-document similarities (approximately 0.2--0.3). To enhance retrieval effectiveness, we implement a two-fold approach: first, domain-aware query refinement by incorporating specialized terms such as resources-online-learning, student-online-services, and career-advising; second, the integration of structured educational descriptors like "online resume and interview improvement tools." Additionally, we automate the extraction of domain-specific keywords from top-ranked documents to suggest relevant terms for query expansion. Through experiments conducted on five baseline queries, our semi-automated iterative refinement process elevates the average top similarity score from approximately 0.18 to 0.42, marking a substantial improvement in retrieval performance. The implementation details, including reproducible code and experimental setups, are made available in our GitHub repositories \url{https://github.com/Elipei88/HumberChatbotBackend} and \url{https://github.com/Nisarg851/HumberChatbot}. We also discuss the limitations of our approach and propose future directions, including the integration of advanced neural retrieval models.
title Iterative NLP Query Refinement for Enhancing Domain-Specific Information Retrieval: A Case Study in Career Services
topic Information Retrieval
Computation and Language
I.7.3; H.3.3
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.17075