Conversational Bibliographic Search

Finding experts, publications, and topics is a daily task not only of every scientist and student but also for journalists and people who search for sources when consuming information. To support this process, we aim to develop a conversational search engine with which it is possible to search for experts interactively and to explore interesting publications and topics where existing tools reach their limits. An important aspect of the search is that the search query is formulated in such a way that it leads to the desired result. However, formulating a query by a user or understanding a query by a system are challenging tasks. For example, when a query is formulated too unspecific, the search results might not entirely cover the information need whereby small further pieces of information can help immensely. Current systems do little to accurately understand the user’s search intent and offer little support during the search process. Thus, we designed an interactive search engine which runs in a chat window, so that the query can be specified over several turns until the desired search results are obtained. The search engine initiates the conversation by asking the user what they want to search for. The user answers in natural language or can choose adequate answers suggested by the system. The conversation continues until the user has fulfilled their search need or wants to start the conversation from the beginning in order to perform a new search.