How Can Context Help? Exploring Joint Retrieval of Passage and Personalized Context
This addresses a gap in personalized context-aware systems for conversational AI, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing dense retrieval methods.
The paper tackles the problem of integrating personalized context into document-grounded conversational systems by introducing the task of context-aware passage retrieval and proposing the PCAS method, which outperforms baselines in retrieving relevant passages and identifying pertinent contexts.
The integration of external personalized context information into document-grounded conversational systems has significant potential business value, but has not been well-studied. Motivated by the concept of personalized context-aware document-grounded conversational systems, we introduce the task of context-aware passage retrieval. We also construct a dataset specifically curated for this purpose. We describe multiple baseline systems to address this task, and propose a novel approach, Personalized Context-Aware Search (PCAS), that effectively harnesses contextual information during passage retrieval. Experimental evaluations conducted on multiple popular dense retrieval systems demonstrate that our proposed approach not only outperforms the baselines in retrieving the most relevant passage but also excels at identifying the pertinent context among all the available contexts. We envision that our contributions will serve as a catalyst for inspiring future research endeavors in this promising direction.