👀 Toward Conversational Query Reformulation (DESIRES21)

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Toward Conversational Query Reformulation

Contribution summary

• Kiesel et al. analyzed the query reformulation in conversational search by casting the reformulation as CRUD (create, read, update, delete) operation
• to understand the principles of "editing conversations", and
• found that ambiguities in the reformulations will be a major challenge for conversational search.

Authors

Johannes Kiesel1 , Xiaoni Cai1 , Roxanne El Baff2 , Benno Stein1 and Matthias Hagen3

1. Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Bauhausstraße 11, 99423 Weimar, Germany
2. German Aerospace Center (DLR), Germany
3. Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, Von-Seckendorff-Platz 1, 06120 Halle (Saale), Germany

Motivation

• In conversational search, users "describe" their changes to a query; however, the principles of such “editing conversations” have not been analyzed

Method

• Cast reformulations (i.e., "edit") as meta-queries that imply operations on the original query and categorize the operations following the standard CRUD terminology (create, read, update, delete)
• Crowdsourced a dataset with 2694 human reformulations across four search domains

Results / Insight

• Ambiguities in the reformulations will likely be a major challenge for conversational search

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Others

• Dataset: https://zenodo.org/record/5165203#.YUSiuGYzZ26