Automated Collection of Evaluation Dataset for Semantic Search in Low-Resource Domain Language

TL;DR

This paper presents an automated pipeline for creating evaluation datasets for semantic search in low-resource, domain-specific German language, utilizing ensemble of weak encoders and LLMs to improve relevance scoring accuracy.

Contribution

It introduces an end-to-end annotation pipeline that automates dataset collection for semantic search evaluation in low-resource, domain-specific languages, leveraging ensemble learning and LLMs.

Findings

Ensemble of weak encoders improves relevance score accuracy.

Automated dataset collection reduces manual annotation effort.

Ensemble method outperforms individual models in agreement with human relevance judgments.

Abstract

Domain-specific languages that use a lot of specific terminology often fall into the category of low-resource languages. Collecting test datasets in a narrow domain is time-consuming and requires skilled human resources with domain knowledge and training for the annotation task. This study addresses the challenge of automated collecting test datasets to evaluate semantic search in low-resource domain-specific German language of the process industry. Our approach proposes an end-to-end annotation pipeline for automated query generation to the score reassessment of query-document pairs. To overcome the lack of text encoders trained in the German chemistry domain, we explore a principle of an ensemble of "weak" text encoders trained on common knowledge datasets. We combine individual relevance scores from diverse models to retrieve document candidates and relevance scores generated by an LLM, aiming to achieve consensus on query-document alignment. Evaluation results demonstrate that the ensemble method significantly improves alignment with human-assigned relevance scores, outperforming individual models in both inter-coder agreement and accuracy metrics. These findings suggest that ensemble learning can effectively adapt semantic search systems for specialized, low-resource languages, offering a practical solution to resource limitations in domain-specific contexts.