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Multi-Stage Conversational Passage Retrieval: An Approach to Fusing Term Importance Estimation and Neural Query Rewriting

Published: 01 September 2021 Publication History

Abstract

Conversational search plays a vital role in conversational information seeking. As queries in information seeking dialogues are ambiguous for traditional ad hoc information retrieval (IR) systems due to the coreference and omission resolution problems inherent in natural language dialogue, resolving these ambiguities is crucial. In this article, we tackle conversational passage retrieval, an important component of conversational search, by addressing query ambiguities with query reformulation integrated into a multi-stage ad hoc IR system. Specifically, we propose two conversational query reformulation (CQR) methods: (1) term importance estimation and (2) neural query rewriting. For the former, we expand conversational queries using important terms extracted from the conversational context with frequency-based signals. For the latter, we reformulate conversational queries into natural, stand-alone, human-understandable queries with a pretrained sequence-to-sequence model. Detailed analyses of the two CQR methods are provided quantitatively and qualitatively, explaining their advantages, disadvantages, and distinct behaviors. Moreover, to leverage the strengths of both CQR methods, we propose combining their output with reciprocal rank fusion, yielding state-of-the-art retrieval effectiveness, 30% improvement in terms of NDCG@3 compared to the best submission of Text REtrieval Conference (TREC) Conversational Assistant Track (CAsT) 2019.

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  1. Multi-Stage Conversational Passage Retrieval: An Approach to Fusing Term Importance Estimation and Neural Query Rewriting

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        cover image ACM Transactions on Information Systems
        ACM Transactions on Information Systems  Volume 39, Issue 4
        October 2021
        482 pages
        ISSN:1046-8188
        EISSN:1558-2868
        DOI:10.1145/3477247
        Issue’s Table of Contents
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        Publication History

        Published: 01 September 2021
        Accepted: 01 December 2020
        Revised: 01 December 2020
        Received: 01 May 2020
        Published in TOIS Volume 39, Issue 4

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        Author Tags

        1. Conversational search
        2. multi-stage retrieval
        3. query variations

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        • Canada First Research Excellence Fund
        • Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC)
        • Ministry of Science and Technology in Taiwan

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        • (2024)ConvSDG: Session Data Generation for Conversational SearchCompanion Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 202410.1145/3589335.3651940(1634-1642)Online publication date: 13-May-2024
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        • (2023)Improving Conversational Passage Re-ranking with View EnsembleProceedings of the 46th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval10.1145/3539618.3592002(2077-2081)Online publication date: 19-Jul-2023
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