NORMY: Non-Uniform History Modeling for Open Retrieval Conversational Question Answering

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Hauptverfasser: Rashid, Muhammad Shihab, Meem, Jannat Ara, Hristidis, Vagelis
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Rashid, Muhammad Shihab
Meem, Jannat Ara
Hristidis, Vagelis
author_facet Rashid, Muhammad Shihab
Meem, Jannat Ara
Hristidis, Vagelis
contents Open Retrieval Conversational Question Answering (OrConvQA) answers a question given a conversation as context and a document collection. A typical OrConvQA pipeline consists of three modules: a Retriever to retrieve relevant documents from the collection, a Reranker to rerank them given the question and the context, and a Reader to extract an answer span. The conversational turns can provide valuable context to answer the final query. State-of-the-art OrConvQA systems use the same history modeling for all three modules of the pipeline. We hypothesize this as suboptimal. Specifically, we argue that a broader context is needed in the first modules of the pipeline to not miss relevant documents, while a narrower context is needed in the last modules to identify the exact answer span. We propose NORMY, the first unsupervised non-uniform history modeling pipeline which generates the best conversational history for each module. We further propose a novel Retriever for NORMY, which employs keyphrase extraction on the conversation history, and leverages passages retrieved in previous turns as additional context. We also created a new dataset for OrConvQA, by expanding the doc2dial dataset. We implemented various state-of-the-art history modeling techniques and comprehensively evaluated them separately for each module of the pipeline on three datasets: OR-QUAC, our doc2dial extension, and ConvMix. Our extensive experiments show that NORMY outperforms the state-of-the-art in the individual modules and in the end-to-end system.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_04548
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle NORMY: Non-Uniform History Modeling for Open Retrieval Conversational Question Answering
Rashid, Muhammad Shihab
Meem, Jannat Ara
Hristidis, Vagelis
Information Retrieval
Open Retrieval Conversational Question Answering (OrConvQA) answers a question given a conversation as context and a document collection. A typical OrConvQA pipeline consists of three modules: a Retriever to retrieve relevant documents from the collection, a Reranker to rerank them given the question and the context, and a Reader to extract an answer span. The conversational turns can provide valuable context to answer the final query. State-of-the-art OrConvQA systems use the same history modeling for all three modules of the pipeline. We hypothesize this as suboptimal. Specifically, we argue that a broader context is needed in the first modules of the pipeline to not miss relevant documents, while a narrower context is needed in the last modules to identify the exact answer span. We propose NORMY, the first unsupervised non-uniform history modeling pipeline which generates the best conversational history for each module. We further propose a novel Retriever for NORMY, which employs keyphrase extraction on the conversation history, and leverages passages retrieved in previous turns as additional context. We also created a new dataset for OrConvQA, by expanding the doc2dial dataset. We implemented various state-of-the-art history modeling techniques and comprehensively evaluated them separately for each module of the pipeline on three datasets: OR-QUAC, our doc2dial extension, and ConvMix. Our extensive experiments show that NORMY outperforms the state-of-the-art in the individual modules and in the end-to-end system.
title NORMY: Non-Uniform History Modeling for Open Retrieval Conversational Question Answering
topic Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.04548