Related papers: Evaluating Mixed-initiative Conversational Search …
Many people browse online communities to learn from others' experiences and opinions, e.g., for constructing travel plans. Conversational search powered by large language models (LLMs) could ease this information-seeking task, but it…
With large language models (LLMs), conversational search engines shift how users retrieve information from the web by enabling natural conversations to express their search intents over multiple turns. Users' natural conversation embodies…
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…
Conversational Machine Comprehension (CMC), a research track in conversational AI, expects the machine to understand an open-domain natural language text and thereafter engage in a multi-turn conversation to answer questions related to the…
System-oriented IR evaluations are limited to rather abstract understandings of real user behavior. As a solution, simulating user interactions provides a cost-efficient way to support system-oriented experiments with more realistic…
This paper introduces the task of product demand clarification within an e-commercial scenario, where the user commences the conversation with ambiguous queries and the task-oriented agent is designed to achieve more accurate and tailored…
Conversational systems have made significant progress in generating natural language responses. However, their potential as conversational search systems is currently limited due to their passive role in the information-seeking process. One…
User simulators are essential for the scalable training and evaluation of interactive AI systems. However, existing approaches often rely on shallow user profiling, struggle to maintain persona consistency over long interactions, and are…
Query auto completion (QAC) systems are a standard part of search engines in industry, helping users formulate their query. Such systems update their suggestions after the user types each character, predicting the user's intent using…
The Recherche Appliquee en Linguistique Informatique (RALI) team participated in the 2024 TREC Interactive Knowledge Assistance (iKAT) Track. In personalized conversational search, effectively capturing a user's complex search intent…
Intelligent personal assistant systems that are able to have multi-turn conversations with human users are becoming increasingly popular. Most previous research has been focused on using either retrieval-based or generation-based methods to…
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…
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…
Conversational search aims to retrieve passages containing essential information to answer queries in a multi-turn conversation. In conversational search, reformulating context-dependent conversational queries into stand-alone forms is…
Real dialogues with AI assistants for solving data-centric tasks often follow dynamic, unpredictable paths due to imperfect information provided by the user or in the data, which must be caught and handled. Developing datasets which capture…
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…
Users often ask dialogue systems ambiguous questions that require clarification. We show that current language models rarely ask users to clarify ambiguous questions and instead provide incorrect answers. To address this, we introduce CLAM:…
In this paper, we introduce a novel framework, SIMSEEK, (Simulating information-Seeking conversation from unlabeled documents), and compare its two variants. In our baseline SIMSEEK-SYM, a questioner generates follow-up questions upon the…
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.…
Interpretability tools that offer explanations in the form of a dialogue have demonstrated their efficacy in enhancing users' understanding (Slack et al., 2023; Shen et al., 2023), as one-off explanations may fall short in providing…