Users often fail to formulate their complex information needs in a single query. As a consequence, they may need to scan multiple result pages or reformulate their queries, which may be a frustrating experience. Alternatively, systems can improve user satisfaction by proactively asking questions of the users to clarify their information needs. Asking clarifying questions is especially important in conversational systems since they can only return a limited number of (often only one) result(s). In this paper, we formulate the task of asking clarifying questions in open-domain information-seeking conversational systems. To this end, we propose an offline evaluation methodology for the task and collect a dataset, called Qulac, through crowdsourcing. Our dataset is built on top of the TREC Web Track 2009-2012 data and consists of over 10K question-answer pairs for 198 TREC topics with 762 facets. Our experiments on an oracle model demonstrate that asking only one good question leads to over 170% retrieval performance improvement in terms of P@1, which clearly demonstrates the potential impact of the task. We further propose a retrieval framework consisting of three components: question retrieval, question selection, and document retrieval. In particular, our question selection model takes into account the original query and previous question-answer interactions while selecting the next question. Our model significantly outperforms competitive baselines. To foster research in this area, we have made Qulac publicly available.
University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）；University of Glasgow（格拉斯哥大学）；MIPT（莫斯科物理技术学院）；AIRI（人工智能研究院）
Enabling open-domain dialogue systems to ask clarifying questions when appropriate is an important direction for improving the quality of the system response. Namely, for cases when a user request is not specific enough for a conversation system to provide an answer right away, it is desirable to ask a clarifying question to increase the chances of retrieving a satisfying answer. To address the problem of 'asking clarifying questions in open-domain dialogues': (1) we collect and release a new dataset focused on open-domain single- and multi-turn conversations, (2) we benchmark several state-of…
University of Massachusetts Amherst（马萨诸塞大学阿默斯特分校）；Microsoft（微软）
Asking clarifying questions in response to ambiguous or faceted queries has been recognized as a useful technique for various information retrieval systems, especially conversational search systems with limited bandwidth interfaces. Analyzing and generating clarifying questions have been studied recently but the accurate utilization of user responses to clarifying questions has been relatively less explored. In this paper, we enrich the representations learned by Transformer networks using a novel attention mechanism from external information sources that weights each term in the conversation.…
University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence（艾伦人工智能研究所）
Information seeking users often pose questions with false presuppositions, especially when asking about unfamiliar topics. Most existing question answering (QA) datasets, in contrast, assume all questions have well defined answers. We introduce CREPE, a QA dataset containing a natural distribution of presupposition failures from online information-seeking forums. We find that 25% of questions contain false presuppositions, and provide annotations for these presuppositions and their corrections. Through extensive baseline experiments, we show that adaptations of existing open-domain QA models c…
A large-scale conversational agent can suffer from understanding user utterances with various ambiguities such as ASR ambiguity, intent ambiguity, and hypothesis ambiguity. When ambiguities are detected, the agent should engage in a clarifying dialog to resolve the ambiguities before committing to actions. However, asking clarifying questions for all the ambiguity occurrences could lead to asking too many questions, essentially hampering the user experience. To trigger clarifying questions only when necessary for the user satisfaction, we propose a neural self-attentive model that leverages th…
People often share personal narratives in order to seek advice from others. To properly infer the narrator's intention, one needs to apply a certain degree of common sense and social intuition. To test the capabilities of NLP systems to recover such intuition, we introduce the new task of inferring what is the advice-seeking goal behind a personal narrative. We formulate this as a cloze test, where the goal is to identify which of two advice-seeking questions was removed from a given narrative. The main challenge in constructing this task is finding pairs of semantically plausible advice-seeki…
Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；Amazon Alexa AI（亚马逊Alexa AI）
Open domain conversational agents can answer a broad range of targeted queries. However, the sequential nature of interaction with these systems makes knowledge exploration a lengthy task which burdens the user with asking a chain of well phrased questions. In this paper, we present a retrieval based system and associated dataset for predicting the next questions that the user might have. Such a system can proactively assist users in knowledge exploration leading to a more engaging dialog. The retrieval system is trained on a dataset which contains ~14K multi-turn information-seeking conversat…
University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
Search and recommender systems that take the initiative to ask clarifying questions to better understand users' information needs are receiving increasing attention from the research community. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is no empirical study to quantify whether and to what extent users are willing or able to answer these questions. In this work, we conduct an online experiment by deploying an experimental system, which interacts with users by asking clarifying questions against a product repository. We collect both implicit interaction behavior data and explicit feedback fro…
Università della Svizzera italiana（瑞士意大利语区大学）；University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）
Clarifying the underlying user information need by asking clarifying questions is an important feature of modern conversational search system. However, evaluation of such systems through answering prompted clarifying questions requires significant human effort, which can be time-consuming and expensive. In this paper, we propose a conversational User Simulator, called USi, for automatic evaluation of such conversational search systems. Given a description of an information need, USi is capable of automatically answering clarifying questions about the topic throughout the search session. Throug…
University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）；Microsoft Research AI（微软研究院人工智能）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）；University of Glasgow（格拉斯哥大学）；MIPT（莫斯科物理技术学院）
This document presents a detailed description of the challenge on clarifying questions for dialogue systems (ClariQ). The challenge is organized as part of the Conversational AI challenge series (ConvAI3) at Search Oriented Conversational AI (SCAI) EMNLP workshop in 2020. The main aim of the conversational systems is to return an appropriate answer in response to the user requests. However, some user requests might be ambiguous. In IR settings such a situation is handled mainly thought the diversification of the search result page. It is however much more challenging in dialogue settings with …
University of Utah（犹他大学）；Microsoft（微软）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
A long-standing challenge for search and conversational assistants is query intention detection in ambiguous queries. Asking clarifying questions in conversational search has been widely studied and considered an effective solution to resolve query ambiguity. Existing work have explored various approaches for clarifying question ranking and generation. However, due to the lack of real conversational search data, they have to use artificial datasets for training, which limits their generalizability to real-world search scenarios. As a result, the industry has shown reluctance to implement them …
Uncertainty of Thoughts: Uncertainty-Aware Planning Enhances Information Seeking in Large Language Models
National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；University College London（伦敦大学学院）；Yale University（耶鲁大学）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）
提出Uncertainty of Thoughts (UoT)算法，通过不确定性感知模拟、基于不确定性的奖励和奖励传播机制，增强大型语言模型主动提问寻求信息的能力，在医疗诊断等任务中平均成功率提升38.1%。
Australian Institute of Machine Learning（澳大利亚机器学习研究所）；The University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）
One of the core challenges in Visual Dialogue problems is asking the question that will provide the most useful information towards achieving the required objective. Encouraging an agent to ask the right questions is difficult because we don't know a-priori what information the agent will need to achieve its task, and we don't have an explicit model of what it knows already. We propose a solution to this problem based on a Bayesian model of the uncertainty in the implicit model maintained by the visual dialogue agent, and in the function used to select an appropriate output. By selecting the q…
Open-ended human learning and information-seeking are increasingly mediated by digital assistants. However, such systems often ignore the user's pre-existing knowledge. Assuming a correlation between engagement and user responses such as "liking" messages or asking followup questions, we design a Wizard-of-Oz dialog task that tests the hypothesis that engagement increases when users are presented with facts related to what they know. Through crowd-sourcing of this experiment, we collect and release 14K dialogs (181K utterances) where users and assistants converse about geographic topics like g…
The University of Queensland（昆士兰大学）；Alibaba AI Lab（阿里巴巴人工智能实验室）；University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）
Conversational recommender systems (CRSs) have revolutionized the conventional recommendation paradigm by embracing dialogue agents to dynamically capture the fine-grained user preference. In a typical conversational recommendation scenario, a CRS firstly generates questions to let the user clarify her/his demands and then makes suitable recommendations. Hence, the ability to generate suitable clarifying questions is the key to timely tracing users' dynamic preferences and achieving successful recommendations. However, existing CRSs fall short in asking high-quality questions because: (1) syst…
An overarching goal of natural language processing is to enable machines to communicate seamlessly with humans. However, natural language can be ambiguous or unclear. In cases of uncertainty, humans engage in an interactive process known as repair: asking questions and seeking clarification until their uncertainty is resolved. We propose a framework for building a visually grounded question-asking model capable of producing polar (yes-no) clarification questions to resolve misunderstandings in dialogue. Our model uses an expected information gain objective to derive informative questions from …
InfoGatherer: Principled Information Seeking via Evidence Retrieval and Strategic Questioning
University of British Columbia（不列颠哥伦比亚大学）；Vector Institute（向量研究所）；CIFAR AI Chair（CIFAR人工智能主席）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；Dalhousie University（达尔豪斯大学）
Shandong University（山东大学）；University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）；Ahold Delhaize（阿霍德德尔海兹集团）
Conversational information seeking (CIS) is playing an increasingly important role in connecting people to information. Due to the lack of suitable resource, previous studies on CIS are limited to the study of theoretical/conceptual frameworks, laboratory-based user studies, or a particular aspect of CIS (e.g., asking clarifying questions). In this work, we make efforts to facilitate research on CIS from three aspects. (1) We formulate a pipeline for CIS with six sub-tasks: intent detection (ID), keyphrase extraction (KE), action prediction (AP), query selection (QS), passage selection (PS), a…
Teaching Vision-Language Models to Ask: Resolving Ambiguity in Visual Questions
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学人工智能学院）；Wuhan AI Research（武汉人工智能研究院）
ICPO: Illocution-Calibrated Policy Optimization for Multi-Turn Conversation
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Binjiang Institute of Zhejiang University（浙江大学滨江学院）；University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；China University of Petroleum (Beijing)（中国石油大学（北京））；Guangzhou University（广州大学）
