Aligning Query Representation with Rewritten Query and Relevance Judgments in Conversational Search

Understand

Conversational search supports multi-turn user-system interactions to solve complex information needs.

• Different from the traditional single-turn ad-hoc search, conversational search encounters a more challenging problem of context-dependent query understanding with the lengthy and long-tail conversational history context.
• While conversational query rewriting methods leverage explicit rewritten queries to train a rewriting model to transform the context-dependent query into a stand-stone search query, this is usually done without considering the quality of search results.
• Conversational dense retrieval methods use fine-tuning to improve a pre-trained ad-hoc query encoder, but they are limited by the conversational search data available for training.