Bilingual citizen assistant for a national portal
Challenge
A services portal was routing every question — however routine — to a human queue, with a two-day median reply and no Arabic parity.
Approach
A retrieval assistant grounded in the regulations, with a re-ranker fine-tuned on real tickets and a refusal path that escalates cleanly when confidence drops.
Research note: most of the accuracy came from the re-ranker, not a bigger model. Swapping the 70B for a fine-tuned 8B cut cost 83% with no measurable quality loss.
