Keyword Augmented Retrieval: Novel framework for Information Retrieval integrated with speech interface

Retrieving answers in a quick and low cost manner without hallucinations from a combination of structured and unstructured data using Language models is a major hurdle which prevents employment of Language models in knowledge retrieval automation. This becomes accentuated when one wants to integrate a speech interface. Besides, for commercial search and chatbot applications, complete reliance on commercial large language models (LLMs) like GPT 3.5 etc. can be very costly. In this work, authors have addressed this problem by first developing a keyword based search framework which augments discovery of the context to be provided to the large language model. The keywords in turn are generated by LLM and cached for comparison with keywords generated by LLM against the query raised. This significantly reduces time and cost to find the context within documents. Once the context is set, LLM uses that to provide answers based on a prompt tailored for Q&A. This research work demonstrates that use of keywords in context identification reduces the overall inference time and cost of information retrieval. Given this reduction in inference time and cost with the keyword augmented retrieval framework, a speech based interface for user input and response readout was integrated. This allowed a seamless interaction with the language model.