Improving the Reusability of Conversational Search Test Collections

Incomplete relevance judgments limit the reusability of test collections. When new systems are compared to previous systems that contributed to the pool, they often face a disadvantage. This is due to pockets of unjudged documents (called holes) in the test collection that the new systems return. The very nature of Conversational Search (CS) means that these holes are potentially larger and more problematic when evaluating systems. In this paper, we aim to extend CS test collections by employing Large Language Models (LLMs) to fill holes by leveraging existing judgments. We explore this problem using TREC iKAT 23 and TREC CAsT 22 collections, where information needs are highly dynamic and the responses are much more varied, leaving bigger holes to fill. Our experiments reveal that CS collections show a trend towards less reusability in deeper turns. Also, fine-tuning the Llama 3.1 model leads to high agreement with human assessors, while few-shot prompting the ChatGPT results in low agreement with humans. Consequently, filling the holes of a new system using ChatGPT leads to a higher change in the location of the new system. While regenerating the assessment pool with few-shot prompting the ChatGPT model and using it for evaluation achieves a high rank correlation with human-assessed pools. We show that filling the holes using few-shot training the Llama 3.1 model enables a fairer comparison between the new system and the systems contributed to the pool. Our hole-filling model based on few-shot training of the Llama 3.1 model can improve the reusability of test collections.

Conversational Gold: Evaluating Personalized Conversational Search System using Gold Nuggets

The rise of personalized conversational search systems has been driven by advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs), enabling these systems to retrieve and generate answers for complex information needs. However, the automatic evaluation of responses generated by Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) systems remains an understudied challenge. In this paper, we introduce a new resource for assessing the retrieval effectiveness and relevance of response generated by RAG systems, using a nugget-based evaluation framework. Built upon the foundation of TREC iKAT 2023, our dataset extends to the TREC iKAT 2024 collection, which includes 17 conversations and 20,575 relevance passage assessments, together with 2,279 extracted gold nuggets, and 62 manually written gold answers from NIST assessors. While maintaining the core structure of its predecessor, this new collection enables a deeper exploration of generation tasks in conversational settings. Key improvements in iKAT 2024 include: (1) ``gold nuggets'' -- concise, essential pieces of information extracted from relevant passages of the collection -- which serve as a foundation for automatic response evaluation; (2) manually written answers to provide a gold standard for response evaluation; (3) unanswerable questions to evaluate model hallucination; (4) expanded user personas, providing richer contextual grounding; and (5) a transition from Personal Text Knowledge Base (PTKB) ranking to PTKB classification and selection. Built on this resource, we provide a framework for long-form answer generation evaluation, involving nuggets extraction and nuggets matching, linked to retrieval. This establishes a solid resource for advancing research in personalized conversational search and long-form answer generation. Our resources are publicly available at https://github.com/irlabamsterdam/CONE-RAG.

Judging the Judges: A Collection of LLM-Generated Relevance Judgements

Using Large Language Models (LLMs) for relevance assessments offers promising opportunities to improve Information Retrieval (IR), Natural Language Processing (NLP), and related fields. Indeed, LLMs hold the promise of allowing IR experimenters to build evaluation collections with a fraction of the manual human labor currently required. This could help with fresh topics on which there is still limited knowledge and could mitigate the challenges of evaluating ranking systems in low-resource scenarios, where it is challenging to find human annotators. Given the fast-paced recent developments in the domain, many questions concerning LLMs as assessors are yet to be answered. Among the aspects that require further investigation, we can list the impact of various components in a relevance judgment generation pipeline, such as the prompt used or the LLM chosen. This paper benchmarks and reports on the results of a large-scale automatic relevance judgment evaluation, the LLMJudge challenge at SIGIR 2024, where different relevance assessment approaches were proposed. In detail, we release and benchmark 42 LLM-generated labels of the TREC 2023 Deep Learning track relevance judgments produced by eight international teams who participated in the challenge. Given their diverse nature, these automatically generated relevance judgments can help the community not only investigate systematic biases caused by LLMs but also explore the effectiveness of ensemble models, analyze the trade-offs between different models and human assessors, and advance methodologies for improving automated evaluation techniques. The released resource is available at the following link: https://llm4eval.github.io/LLMJudge-benchmark/

PSCon: Toward Conversational Product Search

Conversational Product Search (CPS) is confined to simulated conversations due to the lack of real-world CPS datasets that reflect human-like language. Additionally, current conversational datasets are limited to support cross-market and multi-lingual usage. In this paper, we introduce a new CPS data collection protocol and present PSCon, a novel CPS dataset designed to assist product search via human-like conversations. The dataset is constructed using a coached human-to-human data collection protocol and supports two languages and dual markets. Also, the dataset enables thorough exploration of six subtasks of CPS: user intent detection, keyword extraction, system action prediction, question selection, item ranking, and response generation. Furthermore, we also offer an analysis of the dataset and propose a benchmark model on the proposed CPS dataset.

Multi-Turn Multi-Modal Question Clarification for Enhanced Conversational Understanding

Conversational query clarification enables users to refine their search queries through interactive dialogue, improving search effectiveness. Traditional approaches rely on text-based clarifying questions, which often fail to capture complex user preferences, particularly those involving visual attributes. While recent work has explored single-turn multi-modal clarification with images alongside text, such methods do not fully support the progressive nature of user intent refinement over multiple turns. Motivated by this, we introduce the Multi-turn Multi-modal Clarifying Questions (MMCQ) task, which combines text and visual modalities to refine user queries in a multi-turn conversation. To facilitate this task, we create a large-scale dataset named ClariMM comprising over 13k multi-turn interactions and 33k question-answer pairs containing multi-modal clarifying questions. We propose Mario, a retrieval framework that employs a two-phase ranking strategy: initial retrieval with BM25, followed by a multi-modal generative re-ranking model that integrates textual and visual information from conversational history. Our experiments show that multi-turn multi-modal clarification outperforms uni-modal and single-turn approaches, improving MRR by 12.88%. The gains are most significant in longer interactions, demonstrating the value of progressive refinement for complex queries.

Repeat-bias-aware Optimization of Beyond-accuracy Metrics for Next Basket Recommendation

In next basket recommendation (NBR) a set of items is recommended to users based on their historical basket sequences. In many domains, the recommended baskets consist of both repeat items and explore items. Some state-of-the-art NBR methods are heavily biased to recommend repeat items so as to maximize utility. The evaluation and optimization of beyond-accuracy objectives for NBR, such as item fairness and diversity, has attracted increasing attention. How can such beyond-accuracy objectives be pursued in the presence of heavy repeat bias? We find that only optimizing diversity or item fairness without considering repeat bias may cause NBR algorithms to recommend more repeat items. To solve this problem, we propose a model-agnostic repeat-bias-aware optimization algorithm to post-process the recommended results obtained from NBR methods with the objective of mitigating repeat bias when optimizing diversity or item fairness. We consider multiple variations of our optimization algorithm to cater to multiple NBR methods. Experiments on three real-world grocery shopping datasets show that the proposed algorithms can effectively improve diversity and item fairness, and mitigate repeat bias at acceptable Recall loss.

IRLab@iKAT24: Learned Sparse Retrieval with Multi-aspect LLM Query Generation for Conversational Search

The Interactive Knowledge Assistant Track (iKAT) 2024 focuses on advancing conversational assistants, able to adapt their interaction and responses from personalized user knowledge. The track incorporates a Personal Textual Knowledge Base (PTKB) alongside Conversational AI tasks, such as passage ranking and response generation. Query Rewrite being an effective approach for resolving conversational context, we explore Large Language Models (LLMs), as query rewriters. Specifically, our submitted runs explore multi-aspect query generation using the MQ4CS framework, which we further enhance with Learned Sparse Retrieval via the SPLADE architecture, coupled with robust cross-encoder models. We also propose an alternative to the previous interleaving strategy, aggregating multiple aspects during the reranking phase. Our findings indicate that multi-aspect query generation is effective in enhancing performance when integrated with advanced retrieval and reranking models. Our results also lead the way for better personalization in Conversational Search, relying on LLMs to integrate personalization within query rewrite, and outperforming human rewrite performance.

AGENT-CQ: Automatic Generation and Evaluation of Clarifying Questions for Conversational Search with LLMs

Generating diverse and effective clarifying questions is crucial for improving query understanding and retrieval performance in open-domain conversational search (CS) systems. We propose AGENT-CQ (Automatic GENeration, and evaluaTion of Clarifying Questions), an end-to-end LLM-based framework addressing the challenges of scalability and adaptability faced by existing methods that rely on manual curation or template-based approaches. AGENT-CQ consists of two stages: a generation stage employing LLM prompting strategies to generate clarifying questions, and an evaluation stage (CrowdLLM) that simulates human crowdsourcing judgments using multiple LLM instances to assess generated questions and answers based on comprehensive quality metrics. Extensive experiments on the ClariQ dataset demonstrate CrowdLLM's effectiveness in evaluating question and answer quality. Human evaluation and CrowdLLM show that the AGENT-CQ - generation stage, consistently outperforms baselines in various aspects of question and answer quality. In retrieval-based evaluation, LLM-generated questions significantly enhance retrieval effectiveness for both BM25 and cross-encoder models compared to human-generated questions.

DiSCo Meets LLMs: A Unified Approach for Sparse Retrieval and Contextual Distillation in Conversational Search

Conversational Search (CS) is the task of retrieving relevant documents from a corpus within a conversational context, combining retrieval with conversational context modeling. With the explosion of Large Language Models (LLMs), the CS field has seen major improvements with LLMs rewriting user queries, accounting for conversational context. However, engaging LLMs at inference time harms efficiency. Current methods address this by distilling embeddings from human-rewritten queries to learn the context modeling task. Yet, these approaches predominantly focus on context modeling, and only treat the contrastive component of the retrieval task within a distillation-independent loss term. To address these limitations, we propose a new distillation method, as a relaxation of the previous objective, unifying retrieval and context modeling. We relax the existing training objectives by distilling similarity scores between conversations and documents, rather than relying solely on representation learning. Our proposed distillation objective allows for more freedom in the representation space and leverages the contrastive nature of document relevance. Through experiments on Learned Sparse Retrieval (LSR) across 5 CS datasets, our approach demonstrates substantial improvements in both in-domain and out-of-domain retrieval performance, outperforming state-of-the-art with gains of up to 6 points in recall for out-of-domain datasets. Additionally, through the relaxation of the objective, we propose a multi-teacher distillation, using multiple LLMs as teachers, yielding additional gains, and outperforming the teachers themselves in in-domain experiments. Finally, analysis of the sparsity of the models reveals that our distillation allows for better control over the sparsity of the trained models.

Unlocking Markets: A Multilingual Benchmark to Cross-Market Question Answering

Users post numerous product-related questions on e-commerce platforms, affecting their purchase decisions. Product-related question answering (PQA) entails utilizing product-related resources to provide precise responses to users. We propose a novel task of Multilingual Cross-market Product-based Question Answering (MCPQA) and define the task as providing answers to product-related questions in a main marketplace by utilizing information from another resource-rich auxiliary marketplace in a multilingual context. We introduce a large-scale dataset comprising over 7 million questions from 17 marketplaces across 11 languages. We then perform automatic translation on the Electronics category of our dataset, naming it as McMarket. We focus on two subtasks: review-based answer generation and product-related question ranking. For each subtask, we label a subset of McMarket using an LLM and further evaluate the quality of the annotations via human assessment. We then conduct experiments to benchmark our dataset, using models ranging from traditional lexical models to LLMs in both single-market and cross-market scenarios across McMarket and the corresponding LLM subset. Results show that incorporating cross-market information significantly enhances performance in both tasks.