How can we better understand the mechanisms behind multi-turn information seeking dialogues? How can we use these insights to design a dialogue system that does not require explicit query formulation upfront as in question answering? To answer these questions, we collected observations of human participants performing a similar task to obtain inspiration for the system design. Then, we studied the structure of conversations that occurred in these settings and used the resulting insights to develop a grounded theory, design and evaluate a first system prototype. Evaluation results show that our approach is effective and can complement query-based information retrieval approaches. We contribute new insights about information-seeking behavior by analyzing and providing automated support for a type of information-seeking strategy that is effective when the clarity of the information need and familiarity with the collection content are low.
@article{arxiv.2012.03704,
title = {Conversational Browsing},
author = {Svitlana Vakulenko and Vadim Savenkov and Maarten de Rijke},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2012.03704},
year = {2020}
}