Asking Clarifying Questions Based on Negative Feedback in Conversational Search
This work addresses the challenge of complex information-seeking needs for users in conversational search, though it is incremental as it builds on existing methods for intent clarification.
The paper tackles the problem of reducing user effort in conversational search by proposing a system that asks yes/no clarifying questions based on negative feedback, achieving significant improvements in intent identification and document retrieval tasks on the Qulac dataset.
Users often need to look through multiple search result pages or reformulate queries when they have complex information-seeking needs. Conversational search systems make it possible to improve user satisfaction by asking questions to clarify users' search intents. This, however, can take significant effort to answer a series of questions starting with "what/why/how". To quickly identify user intent and reduce effort during interactions, we propose an intent clarification task based on yes/no questions where the system needs to ask the correct question about intents within the fewest conversation turns. In this task, it is essential to use negative feedback about the previous questions in the conversation history. To this end, we propose a Maximum-Marginal-Relevance (MMR) based BERT model (MMR-BERT) to leverage negative feedback based on the MMR principle for the next clarifying question selection. Experiments on the Qulac dataset show that MMR-BERT outperforms state-of-the-art baselines significantly on the intent identification task and the selected questions also achieve significantly better performance in the associated document retrieval tasks.