Automated Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) retrieval provides an effective procedure to provide prompt responses to natural language based queries, providing an efficient platform for large-scale service-providing companies for presenting readily available information pertaining to customers’ questions. We propose DTAFA, a novel multi-lingual FAQ retrieval system that aims at improving the top-1 retrieval accuracy with the least number of parameters. We propose two decoupled deep learning architectures trained for (i) candidate generation via text classification for a user question, and (ii) learning fine-grained semantic similarity between user questions and the FAQ repository for candidate refinement. We validate our system using real-life enterprise data as well as open source dataset. Empirically we show that DTAFA achieves better accuracy compared to existing state-of-the-art while requiring nearly 30× lesser number of training parameters.

Multilingual sentence embeddings capture rich semantic information not only for measuring similarity between texts but also for catering to a broad range of downstream cross-lingual NLP tasks. State-of-the-art multilingual sentence embedding models require large parallel corpora to learn efficiently, which confines the scope of these models. In this paper, we propose a novel sentence embedding framework based on an unsupervised loss function for generating effective multilingual sentence embeddings, eliminating the need for parallel corpora. We capture semantic similarity and relatedness between sentences using a multi-task loss function for training a dual encoder model mapping different languages onto the same vector space. We demonstrate the efficacy of an unsupervised as well as a weakly supervised variant of our framework on STS, BUCC and Tatoeba benchmark tasks. The proposed unsupervised sentence embedding framework outperforms even supervised state-of-the-art methods for certain under-resourced languages on the Tatoeba dataset and on a monolingual benchmark. Further, we show enhanced zero-shot learning capabilities for more than 30 languages, with the model being trained on only 13 languages. Our model can be extended to a wide range of languages from any language family, as it overcomes the requirement of parallel corpora for training.