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

Anastasia Zhukova, Christian E. Matt, Bela Gipp


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.
Anthology ID:
2025.loreslm-1.8
Volume:
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Language Models for Low-Resource Languages
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Editors:
Hansi Hettiarachchi, Tharindu Ranasinghe, Paul Rayson, Ruslan Mitkov, Mohamed Gaber, Damith Premasiri, Fiona Anting Tan, Lasitha Uyangodage
Venues:
LoResLM | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
112–122
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.loreslm-1.8/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Anastasia Zhukova, Christian E. Matt, and Bela Gipp. 2025. Automated Collection of Evaluation Dataset for Semantic Search in Low-Resource Domain Language. In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Language Models for Low-Resource Languages, pages 112–122, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Automated Collection of Evaluation Dataset for Semantic Search in Low-Resource Domain Language (Zhukova et al., LoResLM 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.loreslm-1.8.pdf