ProCIS: A Benchmark for Proactive Retrieval in Conversations

The field of conversational information seeking, which is rapidly gaining interest in both academia and industry, is changing how we interact with search engines through natural language interactions. Existing datasets and methods are mostly evaluating reactive conversational information seeking systems that solely provide response to every query from the user. We identify a gap in building and evaluating proactive conversational information seeking systems that can monitor a multi-party human conversation and proactively engage in the conversation at an opportune moment by retrieving useful resources and suggestions. In this paper, we introduce a large-scale dataset for proactive document retrieval that consists of over 2.8 million conversations. We conduct crowdsourcing experiments to obtain high-quality and relatively complete relevance judgments through depth-k pooling. We also collect annotations related to the parts of the conversation that are related to each document, enabling us to evaluate proactive retrieval systems. We introduce normalized proactive discounted cumulative gain (npDCG) for evaluating these systems, and further provide benchmark results for a wide range of models, including a novel model we developed for this task. We believe that the developed dataset, called ProCIS, paves the path towards developing proactive conversational information seeking systems.

Simulating Task-Oriented Dialogues with State Transition Graphs and Large Language Models

This paper explores SynTOD, a new synthetic data generation approach for developing end-to-end Task-Oriented Dialogue (TOD) Systems capable of handling complex tasks such as intent classification, slot filling, conversational question-answering, and retrieval-augmented response generation, without relying on crowdsourcing or real-world data. SynTOD utilizes a state transition graph to define the desired behavior of a TOD system and generates diverse, structured conversations through random walks and response simulation using large language models (LLMs). In our experiments, using graph-guided response simulations leads to significant improvements in intent classification, slot filling and response relevance compared to naive single-prompt simulated conversations. We also investigate the end-to-end TOD effectiveness of different base and instruction-tuned LLMs, with and without the constructed synthetic conversations. Finally, we explore how various LLMs can evaluate responses in a TOD system and how well they are correlated with human judgments. Our findings pave the path towards quick development and evaluation of domain-specific TOD systems. We release our datasets, models, and code for research purposes.