Publications
CONFERENCE (INTERNATIONAL) FAQ Retrieval using Query-Question Similarity and BERT-Based Query-Answer Relevance
Wataru Sakata, Tomohide Shibata (Kyoto University), Ribeka Tanaka (Kyoto University), Sadao Kurohashi (Kyoto University)
The 42nd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2019)
July 21, 2019
Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) retrieval is an important task where the objective is to retrieve an appropriate Question-Answer (QA) pair from a database based on a user's query. We propose a FAQ retrieval system that considers the similarity between a user's query and a question as well as the relevance between the query and an answer. Although a common approach to FAQ retrieval is to construct labeled data for training, it takes annotation costs. Therefore, we use a traditional unsupervised information retrieval system to calculate the similarity between the query and question. On the other hand, the relevance between the query and answer can be learned by using QA pairs in a FAQ database. The recently-proposed BERT model is used for the relevance calculation. Since the number of QA pairs in FAQ page is not enough to train a model, we cope with this issue by leveraging FAQ sets that are similar to the one in question. We evaluate our approach on two datasets. The first one is localgovFAQ, a dataset we construct in a Japanese administrative municipality domain. The second is StackExchange dataset, which is the public dataset in English. We demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms baseline methods on these datasets.
Paper :
FAQ Retrieval using Query-Question Similarity and BERT-Based Query-Answer Relevance
(external link)