Related papers: User Engagement Prediction for Clarification in Se…
Conversational search systems increasingly employ clarifying questions to refine user queries and improve the search experience. Previous studies have demonstrated the usefulness of text-based clarifying questions in enhancing both…
Users often have trouble formulating their information needs into words on the first try when searching online. This can lead to frustration, as they may have to reformulate their queries when retrieved information is not relevant. This can…
Web search is frequently used by people to acquire new knowledge and to satisfy learning-related objectives. In this context, informational search missions with an intention to obtain knowledge pertaining to a topic are prominent. The…
Inquiry is fundamental to communication, and machines cannot effectively collaborate with humans unless they can ask questions. In this work, we build a neural network model for the task of ranking clarification questions. Our model is…
Users often make ambiguous requests that require clarification. We study the problem of asking clarification questions in an information retrieval setting, where systems often face ambiguous search queries and it is challenging to turn the…
Large language models (LLMs) must often respond to highly ambiguous user requests. In such cases, the LLM's best response may be to ask a clarifying question to elicit more information. Existing LLMs often respond by presupposing a single…
Coping with ambiguous questions has been a perennial problem in real-world dialogue systems. Although clarification by asking questions is a common form of human interaction, it is hard to define appropriate questions to elicit more…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have made it possible for recommendation systems to interact with users in open-ended conversational interfaces. In order to personalize LLM responses, it is crucial to elicit user preferences, especially when…
In conversational search systems, a key component is to determine and clarify the intent behind complex queries. We view intent clarification in light of the exploratory search paradigm, where users, through an iterative, evolving process…
The session search task aims at best serving the user's information need given her previous search behavior during the session. We propose an extended relevance model that captures the user's dynamic information need in the session. Our…
Explainable question answering systems predict an answer together with an explanation showing why the answer has been selected. The goal is to enable users to assess the correctness of the system and understand its reasoning process.…
Resolving ambiguities through interaction is a hallmark of natural language, and modeling this behavior is a core challenge in crafting AI assistants. In this work, we study such behavior in LMs by proposing a task-agnostic framework for…
Users often need to look through multiple search result pages or reformulate queries when they have complex information-seeking needs. Conversational search systems make it possible to improve user satisfaction by asking questions to…
A long-standing challenge for search and conversational assistants is query intention detection in ambiguous queries. Asking clarifying questions in conversational search has been widely studied and considered an effective solution to…
Machine learning systems have become popular in fields such as marketing, financing, or data mining. While they are highly accurate, complex machine learning systems pose challenges for engineers and users. Their inherent complexity makes…
In source code search, a common information-seeking strategy involves providing a short initial query with a broad meaning, and then iteratively refining the query using terms gleaned from the results of subsequent searches. This strategy…
This study is the first attempt to explore the impact of clarification question modality on user preference in search engines. We introduce the multi-modal search clarification dataset, MIMICS-MM, containing clarification questions with…
Explainable machine learning and artificial intelligence models have been used to justify a model's decision-making process. This added transparency aims to help improve user performance and understanding of the underlying model. However,…
Enabling open-domain dialogue systems to ask clarifying questions when appropriate is an important direction for improving the quality of the system response. Namely, for cases when a user request is not specific enough for a conversation…
Clarification questions help conversational search systems resolve ambiguous or underspecified user queries. While prior work has focused on fluency and alignment with user intent, especially through facet extraction, much less attention…