Papers with conversational search
Contextualized Query Embeddings for Conversational Search (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to conversational search use multiple inference pipelines that require long inference times . despite their effectiveness, such a pipeline often includes multiple neural models that require longer inference time. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate conversational query reformulation directly into a dense retrieval model . they use a dataset with pseudo-relevance labels to overcome the lack of training data . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model rewrites conversational queries as dense representations in conversational search and open-domain question answering datasets. |
Large Language Models Know Your Contextual Search Intent: A Prompting Framework for Conversational Search (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for understanding users’ contextual search intent show unsatisfactory effectiveness and robustness to handle real conversational search scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose to use large language models to generate multiple query rewrites and hypothetical responses and to aggregate them into an integrated representation that can robustly represent the user’s real contextual search intent. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can generate multiple query rewrites and hypothetical responses and can be used to represent the user’s real contextual search intent. |
CHIQ: Contextual History Enhancement for Improving Query Rewriting in Conversational Search (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in task-solving capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) have motivated researchers to integrate these models into existing conversational search systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages the capabilities of large language models to resolve ambiguities in conversation history before query rewriting. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method leads to state-of-the-art results across most settings compared with closed-source LLMs. |
Interpreting Conversational Dense Retrieval by Rewriting-Enhanced Inversion of Session Embedding (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Conversational dense retrieval models lack interpretability, hindering intuitive understanding of model behaviors . a major limitation of conversational dense search is their lack of interpretability . |
| Approach: | They propose to transform opaque session embeddings into explicit interpretable text . they propose to incorporate external interpretable query rewrites into the transformation process . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach yields more interpretable text and preserves original retrieval performance over baselines. |
CTR-Guided Generative Query Suggestion in Conversational Search (2025.emnlp-industry)
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Erxue Min, Hsiu-Yuan Huang, Xihong Yang, Min Yang, Xin Jia, Yunfang Wu, Hengyi Cai, Junfeng Wang, Shuaiqiang Wang, Dawei Yin
| Challenge: | Generating effective query suggestions requires aligning model outputs with user click preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a generative framework that leverages click modeling to denoise implicit feedback and enables reliable preference optimization for improving real-world user engagement. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms strong baselines in CTR, relevance, diversity and diversity. |
ConvTrans: Transforming Web Search Sessions for Conversational Dense Retrieval (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show that conversational dense retrieval is a promising technique for realizing conversational search, but its implementation is severely hindered by the lack of data. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that transforms easily-accessible web search sessions into conversational search sessions to alleviate the data scarcity problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can transform easily-accessible web search sessions into conversational search sessions. |
AdaRewriter: Unleashing the Power of Prompting-based Conversational Query Reformulation via Test-Time Adaptation (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Prompting-based conversational query reformulation has emerged as a powerful approach for conversational search, refining ambiguous user queries into standalone search queries. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for query reformulation using an outcome-supervised reward model via test-time adaptation. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on five conversational search datasets show that AdaRewriter significantly outperforms the existing methods across most settings. |
Search-Oriented Conversational Query Editing (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing CQR models are not learned toward improving the downstream search performance . existing models generate the rewrite token-by-token from scratch . |
| Approach: | They propose a text editing-based CQR model tailored for conversational search . they propose rewrite tokens are selected from the dialogue in a non-autoregressive fashion . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on three conversational search benchmarks while having low rewriting latency. |
ConvGQR: Generative Query Reformulation for Conversational Search (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to determine a good search query from the whole conversation context are expensive and often lead to sub-optimal results. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to reformulate conversational queries based on generative pre-trained language models (PLMs) they propose generative knowledge infusion mechanism to optimize query reformulation and retrieval. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on four conversational search datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of ConvGQR. |
Enhancing Conversational Search: Large Language Model-Aided Informative Query Rewriting (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to rewrite context-dependent queries lack sufficient information for optimal retrieval performance. |
| Approach: | They propose to use large language models (LLMs) as query rewriters to generate informative queries through well-designed instructions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves performance on the QReCC dataset compared to human rewrites . |
IterCQR: Iterative Conversational Query Reformulation with Retrieval Guidance (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for conversational query reformulation depend on human annotations. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that reformulates context-dependent conversational queries without relying on human rewrites. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method shows state-of-the-art performance on two widely-used datasets. |
Domain Adaptation for Dense Retrieval and Conversational Dense Retrieval through Self-Supervision by Meticulous Pseudo-Relevance Labeling (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that dense retrieval models generalize less well than interaction-based models on out-of-distribution data sets. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine query-generation approach with self-supervision approach in which pseudo-relevance labels are automatically generated on the target domain. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach is based on a T5-3B model for pseudo-positive labeling and hard negatives on conversational dense retrieval models. |
AdaCQR: Enhancing Query Reformulation for Conversational Search via Sparse and Dense Retrieval Alignment (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to address conversational search challenges are limited by one specific retrieval system. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to enhance generalizability of information-seeking queries by aligning reformulation models with term-based and semantic retrieval systems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods in a more efficient framework. |
SCAI-QReCC Shared Task on Conversational Question Answering (2022.lrec-1)
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| Challenge: | evaluating systems for conversational QA remains an open research problem in its own right . evaluating (conversational) QA systems remains an important challenge for developing conversational information retrieval (conversional search) systems. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a conversational question answering task to extend the original conversational QA dataset with alternative correct answers produced by participant systems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task was based on the SCAI-QReCC 2021 shared task on conversational question answering. |
Ranking Manipulation for Conversational Search Engines (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent research demonstrates that Large Language Models are highly vulnerable to jailbreaking and prompt injection attacks. |
| Approach: | They propose a tree-of-attacks-based jailbreaking technique which promotes low-ranked products . they propose enabling LLMs to be jailed and prompt injections to disrupt safety . |
| Outcome: | The proposed technique promotes low-ranked products in conversational search engines. |
Learning Contextual Retrieval for Robust Conversational Search (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Effective conversational search requires a deep understanding of user intent across multiple dialogue turns. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel LLM-based retriever that directly incorporates conversational context into the retrieval process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods while incurring no additional inference overhead. |
Multi-Faceted Self-Consistent Preference Alignment for Query Rewriting in Conversational Search (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to rewrite ambiguous queries ignore feedback from query rewriting, passage retrieval and response generation in the rewritten process. |
| Approach: | They propose to construct self-consistent preference alignment data to generate more diverse rewritten queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is effective in both in- and out-of-distribution scenarios. |
DVCQR: Dual-View Conversational Query Rewriting with Stage-wise Reinforcement Learning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent approaches to improve retrieval effectiveness rely on a single rewrite . however, they often suffer from conflicting optimization signals . |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-view CQR framework that generates two complementary rewrites for each query. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that DVCQR outperforms state-of-the-art methods on most metrics . the proposed framework generates two complementary rewrites for each query . |