Related papers: An In-depth Investigation of User Response Simulat…
As a cornerstone of modern information access, search engines have become indispensable in everyday life. With the rapid advancements in AI and natural language processing (NLP) technologies, particularly large language models (LLMs),…
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…
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…
Conversational search enables multi-turn interactions between users and systems to fulfill users' complex information needs. During this interaction, the system should understand the users' search intent within the conversational context…
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…
Simulating user interactions enables a more user-oriented evaluation of information retrieval (IR) systems. While user simulations are cost-efficient and reproducible, many approaches often lack fidelity regarding real user behavior. Most…
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…
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…
User simulation has long played a vital role in computer science due to its potential to support a wide range of applications. Language, as the primary medium of human communication, forms the foundation of social interaction and behavior.…
Research and development on conversational recommender systems (CRSs) critically depends on sound and reliable evaluation methodologies. However, the interactive nature of these systems poses significant challenges for automatic evaluation.…
The recent success of large language models (LLMs) has shown great potential to develop more powerful conversational recommender systems (CRSs), which rely on natural language conversations to satisfy user needs. In this paper, we embark on…
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…
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…
Clarifying the underlying user information need by asking clarifying questions is an important feature of modern conversational search system. However, evaluation of such systems through answering prompted clarifying questions requires…
Conversational Recommender System (CRS) interacts with users through natural language to understand their preferences and provide personalized recommendations in real-time. CRS has demonstrated significant potential, prompting researchers…
Simulating user search behavior is a critical task in information retrieval, which can be employed for user behavior modeling, data augmentation, and system evaluation. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have opened up new…
Job interviews play a critical role in shaping one's career, yet practicing interview skills can be challenging, especially without access to human coaches or peers for feedback. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) present…
We present a methodology to systematically test conversational recommender systems with regards to conversational breakdowns. It involves examining conversations generated between the system and simulated users for a set of pre-defined…
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…
Due to the advantages in the cost-efficiency and reproducibility, user simulation has become a promising solution to the user-centric evaluation of information retrieval systems. Nonetheless, accurately simulating user search behaviors has…