CHIQ: Contextual History Enhancement for Improving Query Rewriting in Conversational Search

Fengran Mo, Abbas Ghaddar, Kelong Mao, Mehdi Rezagholizadeh, Boxing Chen, Qun Liu, Jian-Yun Nie


Abstract
In this paper, we study how open-source large language models (LLMs) can be effectively deployed for improving query rewriting in conversational search, especially for ambiguous queries. We introduce CHIQ, a two-step method that leverages the capabilities of LLMs to resolve ambiguities in the conversation history before query rewriting. This approach contrasts with prior studies that predominantly use closed-source LLMs to directly generate search queries from conversation history. We demonstrate on five well-established benchmarks that CHIQ leads to state-of-the-art results across most settings, showing highly competitive performances with systems leveraging closed-source LLMs. Our study provides a first step towards leveraging open-source LLMs in conversational search, as a competitive alternative to the prevailing reliance on commercial LLMs. Data, models, and source code will be publicly available upon acceptance at https://github.com/fengranMark/CHIQ.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.135
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2253–2268
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.135
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Fengran Mo, Abbas Ghaddar, Kelong Mao, Mehdi Rezagholizadeh, Boxing Chen, Qun Liu, and Jian-Yun Nie. 2024. CHIQ: Contextual History Enhancement for Improving Query Rewriting in Conversational Search. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 2253–2268, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
CHIQ: Contextual History Enhancement for Improving Query Rewriting in Conversational Search (Mo et al., EMNLP 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.135.pdf