Gabriella Kazai

Tong Liu, Cheng Qian, Matej Cief et al.

Tool-calling is a central component of modern large language model (LLM) agents, equipping them with skills beyond their parametric knowledge. This paper studies tool-calling along two complementary axes: effectiveness, i.e., how this capability is measured, and efficiency, i.e., how it is learned. On effectiveness, we systematically analyze tool-calling evaluation pipelines and show that results can be highly sensitive to seemingly minor, often undocumented implementation choices including the random seed, system prompt, multi-turn template construction, and how prior interaction/reasoning history is carried forward. These choices can lead to substantial differences in reported performance, especially in multi-turn settings where without rigorous standardization, leaderboard rankings are unreliable. On efficiency, we examine standard reinforcement learning (RL) for tool-calling and identify two sources of computational waste: (i) during rollouts, many prompts produce no learning signal, and (ii) during policy updates, optimization incurs high computational cost. Guided by these findings, we introduce two techniques that accelerate RL-based tool-calling training, achieving substantial wall-clock speedup without degrading performance.

Mariya Hendriksen, Svitlana Vakulenko, Jordan Massiah et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are transforming personalized search, recommendations, and customer interaction in e-commerce. Customers increasingly shop across multiple devices, from voice-only assistants to multimodal displays, each offering different input and output capabilities. A proactive suggestion to switch devices can greatly improve the user experience, but it must be offered with high precision to avoid unnecessary friction. We address the challenge of predicting when a query requires visual augmentation and a cross-device switch to improve product discovery. We introduce Image-Seeking Intent Prediction, a novel task for LLM-driven e-commerce assistants that anticipates when a spoken product query should proactively trigger a visual on a screen-enabled device. Using large-scale production data from a multi-device retail assistant, including 900K voice queries, associated product retrievals, and behavioral signals such as image carousel engagement, we train IRP (Image Request Predictor), a model that leverages user input query and corresponding retrieved product metadata to anticipate visual intent. Our experiments show that combining query semantics with product data, particularly when improved through lightweight summarization, consistently improves prediction accuracy. Incorporating a differentiable precision-oriented loss further reduces false positives. These results highlight the potential of LLMs to power intelligent, cross-device shopping assistants that anticipate and adapt to user needs, enabling more seamless and personalized e-commerce experiences.

Chuan Meng, Francesco Tonolini, Fengran Mo et al.

Proactive search in conversations (PSC) aims to reduce user effort in formulating explicit queries by proactively retrieving useful relevant information given conversational context. Previous work in PSC either directly uses this context as input to off-the-shelf ad-hoc retrievers or further fine-tunes them on PSC data. However, ad-hoc retrievers are pre-trained on short and concise queries, while the PSC input is longer and noisier. This input mismatch between ad-hoc search and PSC limits retrieval quality. While fine-tuning on PSC data helps, its benefits remain constrained by this input gap. In this work, we propose Conv2Query, a novel conversation-to-query framework that adapts ad-hoc retrievers to PSC by bridging the input gap between ad-hoc search and PSC. Conv2Query maps conversational context into ad-hoc queries, which can either be used as input for off-the-shelf ad-hoc retrievers or for further fine-tuning on PSC data. Extensive experiments on two PSC datasets show that Conv2Query significantly improves ad-hoc retrievers' performance, both when used directly and after fine-tuning on PSC.

Yue Feng, Yunlong Jiao, Animesh Prasad et al.

User Satisfaction Modeling (USM) is one of the popular choices for task-oriented dialogue systems evaluation, where user satisfaction typically depends on whether the user's task goals were fulfilled by the system. Task-oriented dialogue systems use task schema, which is a set of task attributes, to encode the user's task goals. Existing studies on USM neglect explicitly modeling the user's task goals fulfillment using the task schema. In this paper, we propose SG-USM, a novel schema-guided user satisfaction modeling framework. It explicitly models the degree to which the user's preferences regarding the task attributes are fulfilled by the system for predicting the user's satisfaction level. SG-USM employs a pre-trained language model for encoding dialogue context and task attributes. Further, it employs a fulfillment representation layer for learning how many task attributes have been fulfilled in the dialogue, an importance predictor component for calculating the importance of task attributes. Finally, it predicts the user satisfaction based on task attribute fulfillment and task attribute importance. Experimental results on benchmark datasets (i.e. MWOZ, SGD, ReDial, and JDDC) show that SG-USM consistently outperforms competitive existing methods. Our extensive analysis demonstrates that SG-USM can improve the interpretability of user satisfaction modeling, has good scalability as it can effectively deal with unseen tasks and can also effectively work in low-resource settings by leveraging unlabeled data.

Zhengxiang Shi, Francesco Tonolini, Nikolaos Aletras et al.

Semi-supervised learning (SSL) is a popular setting aiming to effectively utilize unlabelled data to improve model performance in downstream natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Currently, there are two popular approaches to make use of unlabelled data: Self-training (ST) and Task-adaptive pre-training (TAPT). ST uses a teacher model to assign pseudo-labels to the unlabelled data, while TAPT continues pre-training on the unlabelled data before fine-tuning. To the best of our knowledge, the effectiveness of TAPT in SSL tasks has not been systematically studied, and no previous work has directly compared TAPT and ST in terms of their ability to utilize the pool of unlabelled data. In this paper, we provide an extensive empirical study comparing five state-of-the-art ST approaches and TAPT across various NLP tasks and data sizes, including in- and out-of-domain settings. Surprisingly, we find that TAPT is a strong and more robust SSL learner, even when using just a few hundred unlabelled samples or in the presence of domain shifts, compared to more sophisticated ST approaches, and tends to bring greater improvements in SSL than in fully-supervised settings. Our further analysis demonstrates the risks of using ST approaches when the size of labelled or unlabelled data is small or when domain shifts exist. We offer a fresh perspective for future SSL research, suggesting the use of unsupervised pre-training objectives over dependency on pseudo labels.

Gabriella Kazai, Bhaskar Mitra, Anlei Dong et al.

Traditional information retrieval (IR) ranking models process the full text of documents. Newer models based on Transformers, however, would incur a high computational cost when processing long texts, so typically use only snippets from the document instead. The model's input based on a document's URL, title, and snippet (UTS) is akin to the summaries that appear on a search engine results page (SERP) to help searchers decide which result to click. This raises questions about when such summaries are sufficient for relevance estimation by the ranking model or the human assessor, and whether humans and machines benefit from the document's full text in similar ways. To answer these questions, we study human and neural model based relevance assessments on 12k query-documents sampled from Bing's search logs. We compare changes in the relevance assessments when only the document summaries and when the full text is also exposed to assessors, studying a range of query and document properties, e.g., query type, snippet length. Our findings show that the full text is beneficial for humans and a BERT model for similar query and document types, e.g., tail, long queries. A closer look, however, reveals that humans and machines respond to the additional input in very different ways. Adding the full text can also hurt the ranker's performance, e.g., for navigational queries.

Danula Hettiachchi, Mark Sanderson, Jorge Goncalves et al.

This volume contains the position papers presented at CSCW 2021 Workshop - Investigating and Mitigating Biases in Crowdsourced Data, held online on 23rd October 2021, at the 24th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW 2021). The workshop explored how specific crowdsourcing workflows, worker attributes, and work practices contribute to biases in data. The workshop also included discussions on research directions to mitigate labelling biases, particularly in a crowdsourced context, and the implications of such methods for the workers.

Timothy J. Hazen, Alexandra Olteanu, Gabriella Kazai et al.

Past research shows that users benefit from systems that support them in their writing and exploration tasks. The autosuggestion feature of Web search engines is an example of such a system: It helps users in formulating their queries by offering a list of suggestions as they type. Autosuggestions are typically generated by machine learning (ML) systems trained on a corpus of search logs and document representations. Such automated methods can become prone to issues that result in problematic suggestions that are biased, racist, sexist or in other ways inappropriate. While current search engines have become increasingly proficient at suppressing such problematic suggestions, there are still persistent issues that remain. In this paper, we reflect on past efforts and on why certain issues still linger by covering explored solutions along a prototypical pipeline for identifying, detecting, and addressing problematic autosuggestions. To showcase their complexity, we discuss several dimensions of problematic suggestions, difficult issues along the pipeline, and why our discussion applies to the increasing number of applications beyond web search that implement similar textual suggestion features. By outlining persistent social and technical challenges in moderating web search suggestions, we provide a renewed call for action.