Hard Negative Mining for Domain-Specific Retrieval in Enterprise Systems
Authors: name: Hansa Meghwani; name: Amit Agarwal; name: Priyaranjan Pattnayak; name: Hitesh Laxmichand Patel; name: Srikant Panda
Published: 2025-05-23 20:51:20

Abstract: Enterprise search systems often struggle to retrieve accurate,
domain-specific information due to semantic mismatches and overlapping
terminologies. These issues can degrade the performance of downstream
applications such as knowledge management, customer support, and
retrieval-augmented generation agents. To address this challenge, we propose a
scalable hard-negative mining framework tailored specifically for
domain-specific enterprise data. Our approach dynamically selects semantically
challenging but contextually irrelevant documents to enhance deployed
re-ranking models.
  Our method integrates diverse embedding models, performs dimensionality
reduction, and uniquely selects hard negatives, ensuring computational
efficiency and semantic precision. Evaluation on our proprietary enterprise
corpus (cloud services domain) demonstrates substantial improvements of 15\% in
MRR@3 and 19\% in MRR@10 compared to state-of-the-art baselines and other
negative sampling techniques. Further validation on public domain-specific
datasets (FiQA, Climate Fever, TechQA) confirms our method's generalizability
and readiness for real-world applications.