International Conference on Computer and Knowledge Engineering

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A Hybrid Architecture to Optimize Persian FAQ Retrieval using Semantic Similarity Search

Authors :

Seyed Amir Mohammad Hosseini¹ Fatemeh Dehbashi² Setare Kahnemuee³ Mohsen Kahani⁴ Morteza Fardin⁵

1- Computer Engineering Department Ferdowsi University of Mashhad 2- Computer Engineering Department Ferdowsi University of Mashhad 3- Computer Engineering Department Ferdowsi University of Mashhad 4- Computer Engineering Department Ferdowsi University of Mashhad 5- Baran Software Group

Keywords :

Persian Language Processing،FAQ Retrieval،Hybrid Clustering،Sentence Embeddings،Semantic Search،Evaluation Framework

Abstract :

Traditional FAQ-based Question Answering (QA) systems, which rely on lexical matching, often fail to comprehend the semantic nuances of morphologically rich languages like Persian. Furthermore, their performance is typically measured by rigid metrics that underestimate a model's true capabilities. This paper addresses these challenges by proposing a novel, two-stage Hybrid Clustering-Based Search architecture designed to improve both the accuracy and efficiency of semantic retrieval. We introduce an iterative "Hierarchical DBSCAN" method to cluster a real-world Persian knowledge base, allowing for a focused, coarse-to-fine search pipeline. To robustly evaluate our system, we created a new multi-faceted dataset containing formal, informal, and challenging queries. Our experiments show that the proposed hybrid architecture, achieves a Top-1 accuracy of 79% and a Top-3 accuracy of 86% and also answering delay of only 0.115 seconds. This represents an improvement in both accuracy and speed compared to the optimal E5-Base model in the standard Direct Semantic Search baseline. Our work provides an efficient and validated blueprint for developing practical semantic QA systems for the Persian language.