Expansion-enhanced sparse lexical representation improves information retrieval (IR) by minimizing vocabulary mismatch problems during lexical matching. In this paper, we explore the potential of jointly learning dense semantic representation and combining it with the lexical one for ranking candidate information. We present a hybrid information retrieval mechanism that maximizes lexical and semantic matching while minimizing their shortcomings. Our architecture consists of dual hybrid encoders that independently encode queries and information elements. Each encoder jointly learns a dense semantic representation and a sparse lexical representation augmented by a learnable term expansion of the corresponding text through contrastive learning. We demonstrate the efficacy of our model in single-stage ranking of a benchmark product question-answering dataset containing the typical heterogeneous information available on online product pages. Our evaluation demonstrates that our hybrid approach outperforms independently trained retrievers by 10.95% (sparse) and 2.7% (dense) in MRR@5 score. Moreover, our model offers better interpretability and performs comparably to state-of-the-art cross-encoders while reducing response time by 30% (latency) and cutting computational load by approximately 38% (FLOPs).

Letter-like communications (such as email) are a major means of customer relationship management within customer-facing organizations. These communications are initiated on a channel by requests from customers and then responded to by the organization on the same channel. For decades, the job has almost entirely been conducted by human agents who attempt to provide the most appropriate reaction to the request. Rules have been made to standardize the overall customer service process and make sure the customers receive professional responses. Recent progress in natural language processing has made it possible to automate response generation. However, the diversity and open nature of customer queries and the lack of structured knowledge bases make this task even more challenging than typical task-oriented language generation tasks. Keeping those obstacles in mind, we propose a deep-learning based response letter generation framework that attempts to retrieve knowledge from historical responses and utilize it to generate an appropriate reply. Our model uses data augmentation to address the insufficiency of query-response pairs and employs a ranking mechanism to choose the best response from multiple potential options. We show that our technique outperforms the baselines by significant margins while producing consistent and informative responses.