Related papers: Open-domain question classification and completion…
Users often fail to formulate their complex information needs in a single query. As a consequence, they may need to scan multiple result pages or reformulate their queries, which may be a frustrating experience. Alternatively, systems can…
Conversational interfaces that allow for intuitive and comprehensive access to digitally stored information remain an ambitious goal. In this thesis, we lay foundations for designing conversational search systems by analyzing the…
Open-domain conversational search assistants aim at answering user questions about open topics in a conversational manner. In this paper we show how the Transformer architecture achieves state-of-the-art results in key IR tasks, leveraging…
In a conversational context, a user expresses her multi-faceted information need as a sequence of natural-language questions, i.e., utterances. Starting from a given topic, the conversation evolves through user utterances and system…
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…
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…
Conversational search has evolved as a new information retrieval paradigm, marking a shift from traditional search systems towards interactive dialogues with intelligent search agents. This change especially affects exploratory…
Open-domain dialog involves generating search queries that help obtain relevant knowledge for holding informative conversations. However, it can be challenging to determine what information to retrieve when the user is passive and does not…
Information needs around a topic cannot be satisfied in a single turn; users typically ask follow-up questions referring to the same theme and a system must be capable of understanding the conversational context of a request to retrieve…
The Conversational Assistance Track (CAsT) is a new track for TREC 2019 to facilitate Conversational Information Seeking (CIS) research and to create a large-scale reusable test collection for conversational search systems. The document…
Open-domain question answering aims at solving the task of locating the answers to user-generated questions in massive collections of documents. There are two families of solutions available: retriever-readers, and knowledge-graph-based…
Open-domain conversational question answering can be viewed as two tasks: passage retrieval and conversational question answering, where the former relies on selecting candidate passages from a large corpus and the latter requires better…
Conversation is the natural mode for information exchange in daily life, a spoken conversational interaction for search input and output is a logical format for information seeking. However, the conceptualisation of user-system interactions…
Pre-trained language models have been widely exploited to learn dense representations of documents and queries for information retrieval. While previous efforts have primarily focused on improving effectiveness and user satisfaction,…
Conversational interfaces provide a flexible and easy way for users to seek information that may otherwise be difficult or inconvenient to obtain. However, existing interfaces generally fall into one of two categories: FAQs, where users…
Open-domain conversational search (ODCS) aims to provide valuable, up-to-date information, while maintaining natural conversations to help users refine and ultimately answer information needs. However, creating an effective and robust ODCS…
Conversational search systems enable information retrieval via natural language interactions, with the goal of maximizing users' information gain over multiple dialogue turns. The increasing prevalence of conversational interfaces adopting…
Many real-world open-domain conversation applications have specific goals to achieve during open-ended chats, such as recommendation, psychotherapy, education, etc. We study the problem of imposing conversational goals on open-domain chat…
The increasing reliance on digital information necessitates advancements in conversational search systems, particularly in terms of information transparency. While prior research in conversational information-seeking has concentrated on…
To hold a true conversation, an intelligent agent should be able to occasionally take initiative and recommend the next natural conversation topic. This is a challenging task. A topic suggested by the agent should be relevant to the person,…