Applying Transfer Learning for Improving Domain-Specific Search Experience Using Query to Question Similarity

Abstract: Search is one of the most common platforms used to seek information. However, users mostly get overloaded with results whenever they use such a platform to resolve their queries. Nowadays, direct answers to queries are being provided as a part of the search experience. The question-answer (QA) retrieval process plays a significant role in enriching the search experience. Most off-the-shelf Semantic Textual Similarity models work fine for well-formed search queries, but their performances degrade when applied to a domain-specific setting having incomplete or grammatically ill-formed search queries in prevalence. In this paper, we discuss a framework for calculating similarities between a given input query and a set of predefined questions to retrieve the question which matches to it the most. We have used it for the financial domain, but the framework is generalized for any domain-specific search engine and can be used in other domains as well. We use Siamese network [6] over Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) [3] models to train a classifier which generates unnormalized and normalized similarity scores for a given pair of questions. Moreover, for each of these question pairs, we calculate three other similarity scores: cosine similarity between their average word2vec embeddings [15], cosine similarity between their sentence embeddings [7] generated using RoBERTa [17] and their customized fuzzy-match score. Finally, we develop a metaclassifier using Support Vector Machines [19] for combining these five scores to detect if a given pair of questions is similar. We benchmark our model's performance against existing State Of The Art (SOTA) models on Quora Question Pairs (QQP) dataset as well as a dataset specific to the financial domain.