Large Language Models Know Your Contextual Search Intent: A Prompting Framework for Conversational Search

Kelong Mao, Zhicheng Dou, Fengran Mo, Jiewen Hou, Haonan Chen, Hongjin Qian


Abstract
Precisely understanding users’ contextual search intent has been an important challenge for conversational search. As conversational search sessions are much more diverse and long-tailed, existing methods trained on limited data still show unsatisfactory effectiveness and robustness to handle real conversational search scenarios. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated amazing capabilities for text generation and conversation understanding. In this work, we present a simple yet effective prompting framework, called LLM4CS, to leverage LLMs as a text-based search intent interpreter to help conversational search. Under this framework, we explore three prompting methods to generate multiple query rewrites and hypothetical responses, and propose to aggregate them into an integrated representation that can robustly represent the user’s real contextual search intent. Extensive automatic evaluations and human evaluations on three widely used conversational search benchmarks, including CAsT-19, CAsT-20, and CAsT-21, demonstrate the remarkable performance of our simple LLM4CS framework compared with existing methods and even using human rewrites. Our findings provide important evidence to better understand and leverage LLMs for conversational search.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-emnlp.86
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:
1211–1225
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.86
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.86
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Kelong Mao, Zhicheng Dou, Fengran Mo, Jiewen Hou, Haonan Chen, and Hongjin Qian. 2023. Large Language Models Know Your Contextual Search Intent: A Prompting Framework for Conversational Search. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 1211–1225, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Large Language Models Know Your Contextual Search Intent: A Prompting Framework for Conversational Search (Mao et al., Findings 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.86.pdf