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A Conceptual Framework for Implicit Evaluation of Conversational Search Interfaces

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 Publication date 2021
and research's language is English




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Conversational search (CS) has recently become a significant focus of the information retrieval (IR) research community. Multiple studies have been conducted which explore the concept of conversational search. Understanding and advancing research in CS requires careful and detailed evaluation. Existing CS studies have been limited to evaluation based on simple user feedback on task completion. We propose a CS evaluation framework which includes multiple dimensions: search experience, knowledge gain, software usability, cognitive load and user experience, based on studies of conversational systems and IR. We introduce these evaluation criteria and propose their use in a framework for the evaluation of CS systems.



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We propose a unified Implicit Dialog framework for goal-oriented, information seeking tasks of Conversational Search applications. It aims to enable dialog interactions with domain data without replying on explicitly encoded the rules but utilizing the underlying data representation to build the components required for dialog interaction, which we refer as Implicit Dialog in this work. The proposed framework consists of a pipeline of End-to-End trainable modules. A centralized knowledge representation is used to semantically ground multiple dialog modules. An associated set of tools are integrated with the framework to gather end users input for continuous improvement of the system. The goal is to facilitate development of conversational systems by identifying the components and the data that can be adapted and reused across many end-user applications. We demonstrate our approach by creating conversational agents for several independent domains.
Conversational search systems, such as Google Assistant and Microsoft Cortana, enable users to interact with search systems in multiple rounds through natural language dialogues. Evaluating such systems is very challenging given that any natural language responses could be generated, and users commonly interact for multiple semantically coherent rounds to accomplish a search task. Although prior studies proposed many evaluation metrics, the extent of how those measures effectively capture user preference remains to be investigated. In this paper, we systematically meta-evaluate a variety of conversational search metrics. We specifically study three perspectives on those metrics: (1) reliability: the ability to detect actual performance differences as opposed to those observed by chance; (2) fidelity: the ability to agree with ultimate user preference; and (3) intuitiveness: the ability to capture any property deemed important: adequacy, informativeness, and fluency in the context of conversational search. By conducting experiments on two test collections, we find that the performance of different metrics varies significantly across different scenarios whereas consistent with prior studies, existing metrics only achieve a weak correlation with ultimate user preference and satisfaction. METEOR is, comparatively speaking, the best existing single-turn metric considering all three perspectives. We also demonstrate that adapted session-based evaluation metrics can be used to measure multi-turn conversational search, achieving moderate concordance with user satisfaction. To our knowledge, our work establishes the most comprehensive meta-evaluation for conversational search to date.
258 - Zehua Zeng , Phoebe Moh , Fan Du 2021
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