Related papers: Evaluating Mixed-initiative Conversational Search …
When users initiate search sessions, their queries are often unclear or might lack of context; this resulting in inefficient document ranking. Multiple approaches have been proposed by the Information Retrieval community to add context and…
We deal with the scenario of conversational search, where user queries are under-specified or ambiguous. This calls for a mixed-initiative setup. User-asks (queries) and system-answers, as well as system-asks (clarification questions) and…
While the body of research directed towards constructing and generating clarifying questions in mixed-initiative conversational search systems is vast, research aimed at processing and comprehending users' answers to such questions is…
This research aims to explore various methods for assessing user feedback in mixed-initiative conversational search (CS) systems. While CS systems enjoy profuse advancements across multiple aspects, recent research fails to successfully…
Conversational search has seen increased recent attention in both the IR and NLP communities. It seeks to clarify and solve users' search needs through multi-turn natural language interactions. However, most existing systems are trained and…
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…
In conversational search, agents can interact with users by asking clarifying questions to increase their chance to find better results. Many recent works and shared tasks in both NLP and IR communities have focused on identifying the need…
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…
Users often formulate their search queries with immature language without well-developed keywords and complete structures. Such queries fail to express their true information needs and raise ambiguity as fragmental language often yield…
Information seeking conversations between users and Conversational Search Agents (CSAs) consist of multiple turns of interaction. While users initiate a search session, ideally a CSA should sometimes take the lead in the conversation by…
Asking clarifying questions in response to search queries has been recognized as a useful technique for revealing the underlying intent of the query. Clarification has applications in retrieval systems with different interfaces, from the…
Conversational query clarification enables users to refine their search queries through interactive dialogue, improving search effectiveness. Traditional approaches rely on text-based clarifying questions, which often fail to capture…
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…
A peculiarity of conversational search systems is that they involve mixed-initiatives such as system-generated query clarifying questions. Evaluating those systems at a large scale on the end task of IR is very challenging, requiring…
Information access systems, such as search engines, recommender systems, and conversational assistants, have become integral to our daily lives as they help us satisfy our information needs. However, evaluating the effectiveness of these…
Clarification resolution plays an important role in various information retrieval tasks such as interactive question answering and conversational search. In such context, the user often formulates their information needs as short and…
Conversational information access is an emerging research area. Currently, human evaluation is used for end-to-end system evaluation, which is both very time and resource intensive at scale, and thus becomes a bottleneck of progress. As an…
The field of conversational information seeking, which is rapidly gaining interest in both academia and industry, is changing how we interact with search engines through natural language interactions. Existing datasets and methods are…
Conversational search systems, such as Google Assistant and Microsoft Cortana, enable users to interact with search systems in multiple rounds through natural language dialogues. Evaluating such systems is very challenging given that any…
User simulation has been a cost-effective technique for evaluating conversational recommender systems. However, building a human-like simulator is still an open challenge. In this work, we focus on how users reformulate their utterances…