Clarifying user's information need in conversational information retrieval

Soumik Mandal
2021
With traditional information retrieval systems, users are expected to express their information need adequately and accurately to get appropriate responses from the system. This setup generally works well for simple tasks. However, with the increase of task complexities, users face difficulties in expressing information need in the form as expected by the system. Therefore, the case of clarifying the user's information need by the system arises. In current search systems, support in such cases
more » ... s provided in the form of query suggestions or query recommendations.In contrast, conversational information retrieval systems enable the user to interact with the system in the form of dialogs. The conversational approach to information retrieval enables the system to better support the user's information need by asking clarifying questions. However, current research in both natural language processing and information retrieval systems does limited explaining how to form such questions and at what stage of dialog clarifying questions should be asked. To address the research gap, this dissertation investigates the nature of a user's information-seeking conversations with a dialog agent, where the latter is simulating the role of an intelligent system supporting the user's information need. The goal is to identify the type of questions and their patterns an automated intermediary should ask to negotiate and clarify the user's information need. More specifically, this research explores how an intelligent search system should ask the user questions to clarify her information need in complex task scenarios.This dissertation used the Taskmaster-1 dataset, which collected prior, simulated written and spoken conversations between the user and a conversational agent from multiple task domains. In this research, a subset of these conversations was qualitatively coded by expert annotators at the utterance level. The coding labels were derived from Taylor's (1967) questions and negotiations in information-seeking conversations. Addit [...]
doi:10.7282/t3-dtbx-wa64 fatcat:dzcz6saunndcxa63pqsdp46v4y