Analysing the Effect of Clarifying Questions on Document Ranking in Conversational Search

Understand

Recent research on conversational search highlights the importance of mixed-initiative in conversations.

• To enable mixed-initiative, the system should be able to ask clarifying questions to the user.
• However, the ability of the underlying ranking models (which support conversational search) to account for these clarifying questions and answers has not been analysed when ranking documents, at large.
• To this end, we analyse the performance of a lexical ranking model on a conversational search dataset with clarifying questions.