Conversational information seeking (CIS) has been recognized as a major emerging research area in information retrieval. Such research will require data and tools, to allow the implementation and study of conversational systems. This paper introduces Macaw, an open-source framework with a modular architecture for CIS research. Macaw supports multi-turn, multi-modal, and mixed-initiative interactions, and enables research for tasks such as document retrieval, question answering, recommendation, and structured data exploration. It has a modular design to encourage the study of new CIS algorithms, which can be evaluated in batch mode. It can also integrate with a user interface, which allows user studies and data collection in an interactive mode, where the back end can be fully algorithmic or a wizard of oz setup. Macaw is distributed under the MIT License.
@article{arxiv.1912.08904,
title = {Macaw: An Extensible Conversational Information Seeking Platform},
author = {Hamed Zamani and Nick Craswell},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1912.08904},
year = {2019}
}