Staged Linguistic Seeding: Grounded Query Expansion for Verified-Unit QA in AI Contact Centers
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Computer Science > Computation and Language
Title:Staged Linguistic Seeding: Grounded Query Expansion for Verified-Unit QA in AI Contact Centers
Abstract:Customer-service QA in an AI contact center (AICC) runs under deployment constraints that benchmark QA misses: tight voice-hotline latency and a high cost for unsupported or wrong automatic answers. We deploy a system that answers only from a closed set of verified QA units: it returns a retrieved unit verbatim, or routes to clarify, abstain, or handoff. The index is enriched offline by staged linguistic seeding (SLS): a human authors a per-unit world-grounded slot recipe, gpt-4.1-mini renders it into variants, and a light human gate filters them. One methodology is reused across both domains, so inference stays a single retrieval pass with no query-time generation. On held-out query variants from two industrial domains, SLS lifts hybrid R@1 to 0.881/0.930 (+0.27/+0.34), with gains across all five retrievers tested. At the same gpt-4.1-mini generation budget, SLS beats doc2query by +0.20/+0.32, while cross-provenance evaluation provides additional evidence of transfer across generated-query distributions. Verified-unit answering also removes free-form generation's unsupported-content surface (7-13% versus approximately 0%). We report this as an application study, including negative results.
| Comments: | 14 pages, 1 figure, 7 tables. Accepted to the Grounding Language Models (GroundLM) Workshop at EMNLP 2026 |
| Subjects: | Computation and Language (cs.CL); Information Retrieval (cs.IR) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2609.00844 [cs.CL] |
| (or arXiv:2609.00844v1 [cs.CL] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.00844
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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