CIIR Talk Series: Jian-Yun Nie, Toward Conversational and interactive IR

Content

Speaker 

Jian-Yun Nie, University of Montreal

Abstract

Search interface is evolving from a single short query to more natural and interactive ones such as conversational interface. The most distinctive characteristic in conversational search is the dependency of the search intent on the past conversation history. The query should be reformulated to incorporate the conversation context information. Various approaches have been proposed, ranging from learning a query rewriting model from training data, using an LLM to reformulate the query, to performing an end-to-end training to create a query representation. As the conversation context is very noisy, we see the necessity to perform a selection of relevant conversation context for query reformulation. Therefore, we propose to train a selection model to determine if a previous conversation turn is related to the current turn. In addition, query reformulation can leverage various other signals such as the potential answer provided by an LLM. In this talk, I will present several attempts we made to improve query reformulation. The talk will finish by drawing a broader picture of future interactive IR, which includes other user interactions such as clicks.

Bio

Jian-Yun Nie is a professor at the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research, University of Montreal, and a Canada research chair on natural language processing and applications. His research focuses on various problems of information retrieval and natural language processing, including information retrieval models, web search, cross-language information retrieval, recommendation systems, and conversational IR . Jian-Yun Nie is an associate editor of 3 journals and has served as general chair, PC chair and local organization chair for SIGIR conferences, as well as for several other conferences and workshops. He regularly serves as senior PC member of major conferences such as SIGIR, CIKM, ACL, EMNLP, COLING, WWW. He received several best paper awards, including a Best paper award and a Test-of-Time honorable mention award from SIGIR. He is a member of the ACM SIGIR Academy.

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