Template-guided Clarifying Question Generation for Web Search Clarification

Jian Wang, Wenjie Li

Research output: Chapter in book / Conference proceedingConference article published in proceeding or bookAcademic researchpeer-review

15 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Clarification has attracted much attention because of its many potential applications especially in Web search. Since search queries are very short, the underlying user intents are often ambiguous. This makes it challenging for search engines to return the appropriate results that pertain to the users' actual information needs. To address this issue, asking clarifying questions has been recognized as a critical technique. Although previous studies have analyzed the importance of asking to clarify, generating clarifying questions for Web search remains under-explored. In this paper, we tackle this problem in a template-guided manner. Our objective is jointly learning to select question templates and fill question slots, using Transformer-based networks. We conduct experiments on MIMICS, a collection of datasets containing real Web search queries sampled from Bing's search logs. Our method is demonstrated to achieve significant improvements over various competitive baselines.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationCIKM 2021 - Proceedings of the 30th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages3468-3472
Number of pages5
ISBN (Electronic)9781450384469
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 26 Oct 2021
Event30th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, CIKM 2021 - Virtual, Online, Australia
Duration: 1 Nov 20215 Nov 2021

Publication series

NameInternational Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, Proceedings

Conference

Conference30th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, CIKM 2021
Country/TerritoryAustralia
CityVirtual, Online
Period1/11/215/11/21

Keywords

  • joint learning
  • search clarification
  • slot
  • template

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • General Business,Management and Accounting
  • General Decision Sciences

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Template-guided Clarifying Question Generation for Web Search Clarification'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this