Many people browse online communities to learn from others' experiences and opinions, e.g., for constructing travel plans. Conversational search powered by large language models (LLMs) could ease this information-seeking task, but it remains under-investigated within the online community. In this paper, we first conducted an exploratory study (N=10) that indicated the helpfulness of a classic conversational search tool and identified room for improvement. Then, we proposed ConSearcher, an LLM-powered tool with dynamically generated member personas based on user queries to facilitate conversational search in the community. In ConSearcher, users can clarify their interests by checking what a simulated member similar to them may ask and get responses from diverse members' perspectives. A within-subjects study (N=27) showed that compared to two conversational search baselines, ConSearcher led to significantly higher information-seeking outcome and user engagement but raised concerns about over-personalization. We discuss implications for supporting conversational information seeking in online communities.
@article{arxiv.2603.19747,
title = {ConSearcher: Supporting Conversational Information Seeking in Online Communities with Member Personas},
author = {Shiwei Wu and Xinyue Chen and Yuheng Liu and Xingbo Wang and Qingyu Guo and Longfei Chen and Chuhan Shi and Zhenhui Peng},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.19747},
year = {2026}
}