A Comparison of Question Rewriting Methods for Conversational Passage Retrieval
In collaboration with University of Amsterdam
AuthorsSvitlana Vakulenko, Nikos Voskarides, Zhucheng Tu, Shayne Longpre
In collaboration with University of Amsterdam
AuthorsSvitlana Vakulenko, Nikos Voskarides, Zhucheng Tu, Shayne Longpre
Conversational passage retrieval relies on question rewriting to modify the original question so that it no longer depends on the conversation history. Several methods for question rewriting have recently been proposed, but they were compared under different retrieval pipelines. We bridge this gap by thoroughly evaluating those question rewriting methods on the TREC CAsT 2019 and 2020 datasets under the same retrieval pipeline. We analyze the effect of different types of question rewriting methods on retrieval performance and show that by combining question rewriting methods of different types we can achieve state-of-the-art performance on both datasets.
June 1, 2021research area Knowledge Bases and Search, research area Speech and Natural Language Processingconference NAACL
We introduce a new dataset for Question Rewriting in Conversational Context (QReCC), which contains 14K conversations with 80K question-answer pairs. The task in QReCC is to find answers to conversational questions within a collection of 10M web pages (split into 54M passages). Answers to questions in the same conversation may be distributed across several web pages. QReCC provides annotations that allow us to train and evaluate individual...
February 21, 2021research area Knowledge Bases and Search, research area Speech and Natural Language Processingconference WSDM
Conversational question answering (QA) requires the ability to correctly interpret a question in the context of previous conversation turns. We address the conversational QA task by decomposing it into question rewriting and question answering subtasks. The question rewriting (QR) subtask is specifically designed to reformulate ambiguous questions, which depend on the conversational context, into unambiguous questions that can be correctly...