Enhancing Conversational Search: Large Language Model-Aided Informative Query Rewriting

Fanghua Ye, Meng Fang, Shenghui Li, Emine Yilmaz


Abstract
Query rewriting plays a vital role in enhancing conversational search by transforming context-dependent user queries into standalone forms. Existing approaches primarily leverage human-rewritten queries as labels to train query rewriting models. However, human rewrites may lack sufficient information for optimal retrieval performance. To overcome this limitation, we propose utilizing large language models (LLMs) as query rewriters, enabling the generation of informative query rewrites through well-designed instructions. We define four essential properties for well-formed rewrites and incorporate all of them into the instruction. In addition, we introduce the role of rewrite editors for LLMs when initial query rewrites are available, forming a “rewrite-then-edit” process. Furthermore, we propose distilling the rewriting capabilities of LLMs into smaller models to reduce rewriting latency. Our experimental evaluation on the QReCC dataset demonstrates that informative query rewrites can yield substantially improved retrieval performance compared to human rewrites, especially with sparse retrievers.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-emnlp.398
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5985–6006
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.398
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.398
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Fanghua Ye, Meng Fang, Shenghui Li, and Emine Yilmaz. 2023. Enhancing Conversational Search: Large Language Model-Aided Informative Query Rewriting. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 5985–6006, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Enhancing Conversational Search: Large Language Model-Aided Informative Query Rewriting (Ye et al., Findings 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.398.pdf