Domain Adaptation for Conversational Query Production with the RAG Model Feedback

Ante Wang, Linfeng Song, Ge Xu, Jinsong Su


Abstract
Conversational query production is an emerging fundamental task for the dialogue system, where search queries are generated to explore the vast and continually updating knowledge from a search engine. To accelerate this line of research, previous studies have released several datasets with human-annotated search queries. However, the limited annotations still can not cover conversations of various domains. To solve this challenge, we propose a novel domain adaptation framework. It is inspired by a weakly supervised learning algorithm from previous work that guides a model using reinforcement learning with BM25 scores as feedback. Though effective, it is fragile facing noisy content on webpages from a commercial search engine and variance in conversations because of ignoring deep semantic information of dialogue contexts. Thus, we improve the algorithm by taking the advance of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and exploring several practical techniques such as knowledge distillation for stable training. We conduct experiments in multiple settings across different languages. Guided by the RAG model feedback, our model is more robust and performs significantly better especially in a more challenging setting over strong baselines.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-emnlp.612
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:
9129–9141
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.612
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.612
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ante Wang, Linfeng Song, Ge Xu, and Jinsong Su. 2023. Domain Adaptation for Conversational Query Production with the RAG Model Feedback. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 9129–9141, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Domain Adaptation for Conversational Query Production with the RAG Model Feedback (Wang et al., Findings 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.612.pdf