Related papers: CIRCLE: Multi-Turn Query Clarifications with Reinf…
Nowadays e-commerce search has become an integral part of many people's shopping routines. One critical challenge in today's e-commerce search is the semantic matching problem where the relevant items may not contain the exact terms in the…
Query reformulations have long been a key mechanism to alleviate the vocabulary-mismatch problem in information retrieval, for example by expanding the queries with related query terms or by generating paraphrases of the queries. In this…
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…
Problem Statement: The huge number of information on the web as well as the growth of new inexperienced users creates new challenges for information retrieval. It has become increasingly difficult for these users to find relevant documents…
Asking clarifying questions in response to ambiguous or faceted queries has been recognized as a useful technique for various information retrieval systems, especially conversational search systems with limited bandwidth interfaces.…
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…
Many conversational domains require the system to present nuanced information to users. Such systems must follow up what they say to address clarification questions and repair misunderstandings. In this work, we explore this interactive…
In source code search, a common information-seeking strategy involves providing a short initial query with a broad meaning, and then iteratively refining the query using terms gleaned from the results of subsequent searches. This strategy…
Reinforcement learning is a powerful technique for learning from trial and error, but it often requires a large number of interactions to achieve good performance. In some domains, such as sparse-reward tasks, an oracle that can provide…
User queries in information retrieval are often ambiguous, making it challenging for systems to identify a user's target from a single query. While recent dialogue-based interactive retrieval systems can clarify user intent, they are…
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…
Conversational question answering (ConvQA) over law knowledge bases (KBs) involves answering multi-turn natural language questions about law and hope to find answers in the law knowledge base. Despite many methods have been proposed.…
Compared to standard retrieval tasks, passage retrieval for conversational question answering (CQA) poses new challenges in understanding the current user question, as each question needs to be interpreted within the dialogue context.…
This study aims to develop models that generate corpus informed clarifying questions for web search, in a way that ensures the questions align with the available information in the retrieval corpus. We demonstrate the effectiveness of…
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…
Conversational context understanding aims to recognize the real intention of user from the conversation history, which is critical for building the dialogue system. However, the multi-turn conversation understanding in open domain is still…
Training and refreshing a web-scale Question Answering (QA) system for a multi-lingual commercial search engine often requires a huge amount of training examples. One principled idea is to mine implicit relevance feedback from user behavior…
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…
Conversational recommender systems (CRS) dynamically obtain the user preferences via multi-turn questions and answers. The existing CRS solutions are widely dominated by deep reinforcement learning algorithms. However, deep reinforcement…
Most previous work on Conversational Query Rewriting employs an end-to-end rewriting paradigm. However, this approach is hindered by the issue of multiple fuzzy expressions within the query, which complicates the simultaneous identification…