Related papers: Zero-shot Query Contextualization for Conversation…
This paper describes a compact and effective model for low-latency passage retrieval in conversational search based on learned dense representations. Prior to our work, the state-of-the-art approach uses a multi-stage pipeline comprising…
Conversational search supports multi-turn user-system interactions to solve complex information needs. Different from the traditional single-turn ad-hoc search, conversational search encounters a more challenging problem of…
Effective conversational search demands a deep understanding of user intent across multiple dialogue turns. Users frequently use abbreviations and shift topics in the middle of conversations, posing challenges for conventional retrievers.…
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,…
Contextual retrieval is a critical technique for today's search engines in terms of facilitating queries and returning relevant information. This paper reports on the development and evaluation of a system designed to tackle some of the…
The query suggestion or auto-completion mechanisms help users to type less while interacting with a search engine. A basic approach that ranks suggestions according to their frequency in the query logs is suboptimal. Firstly, many candidate…
The use of conversational assistants to search for information is becoming increasingly more popular among the general public, pushing the research towards more advanced and sophisticated techniques. In the last few years, in particular,…
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…
As the popularity of voice assistants continues to surge, conversational search has gained increased attention in Information Retrieval. However, data sparsity issues in conversational search significantly hinder the progress of supervised…
Proactive search in conversations (PSC) aims to reduce user effort in formulating explicit queries by proactively retrieving useful relevant information given conversational context. Previous work in PSC either directly uses this context as…
Conversational search facilitates complex information retrieval by enabling multi-turn interactions between users and the system. Supporting such interactions requires a comprehensive understanding of the conversational inputs to formulate…
Semantic caching significantly reduces computational costs and improves efficiency by storing and reusing large language model (LLM) responses. However, existing systems rely primarily on matching individual queries, lacking awareness of…
Conversational search presents opportunities to support users in their search activities to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of search while reducing their cognitive load. Limitations of the potential competency of conversational…
Rapid response, namely low latency, is fundamental in search applications; it is particularly so in interactive search sessions, such as those encountered in conversational settings. An observation with a potential to reduce latency asserts…
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…
We study contextual search, a generalization of binary search in higher dimensions, which captures settings such as feature-based dynamic pricing. Standard formulations of this problem assume that agents act in accordance with a specific…
Recently, methods have been developed to improve the performance of dense passage retrieval by using context-supervised pre-training. These methods simply consider two passages from the same document to be relevant, without taking into…
Despite the surging demands for multilingual task-oriented dialog systems (e.g., Alexa, Google Home), there has been less research done in multilingual or cross-lingual scenarios. Hence, we propose a zero-shot adaptation of task-oriented…
Conversational query rewriting is crucial for effective conversational search, yet traditional supervised methods require substantial labeled data, which is scarce in low-resource settings. This paper introduces Prompt-Guided In-Context…
Conversational search allows a user to interact with a search system in multiple turns. A query is strongly dependent on the conversation context. An effective way to improve retrieval effectiveness is to expand the current query with…