Asking Multimodal Clarifying Questions in Mixed-Initiative Conversational Search

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Yuan, Yifei, Siro, Clemencia, Aliannejadi, Mohammad, de Rijke, Maarten, Lam, Wai
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Yuan, Yifei
Siro, Clemencia
Aliannejadi, Mohammad
de Rijke, Maarten
Lam, Wai
author_facet Yuan, Yifei
Siro, Clemencia
Aliannejadi, Mohammad
de Rijke, Maarten
Lam, Wai
contents In mixed-initiative conversational search systems, clarifying questions are used to help users who struggle to express their intentions in a single query. These questions aim to uncover user's information needs and resolve query ambiguities. We hypothesize that in scenarios where multimodal information is pertinent, the clarification process can be improved by using non-textual information. Therefore, we propose to add images to clarifying questions and formulate the novel task of asking multimodal clarifying questions in open-domain, mixed-initiative conversational search systems. To facilitate research into this task, we collect a dataset named Melon that contains over 4k multimodal clarifying questions, enriched with over 14k images. We also propose a multimodal query clarification model named Marto and adopt a prompt-based, generative fine-tuning strategy to perform the training of different stages with different prompts. Several analyses are conducted to understand the importance of multimodal contents during the query clarification phase. Experimental results indicate that the addition of images leads to significant improvements of up to 90% in retrieval performance when selecting the relevant images. Extensive analyses are also performed to show the superiority of Marto compared with discriminative baselines in terms of effectiveness and efficiency.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_07742
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Asking Multimodal Clarifying Questions in Mixed-Initiative Conversational Search
Yuan, Yifei
Siro, Clemencia
Aliannejadi, Mohammad
de Rijke, Maarten
Lam, Wai
Computation and Language
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
In mixed-initiative conversational search systems, clarifying questions are used to help users who struggle to express their intentions in a single query. These questions aim to uncover user's information needs and resolve query ambiguities. We hypothesize that in scenarios where multimodal information is pertinent, the clarification process can be improved by using non-textual information. Therefore, we propose to add images to clarifying questions and formulate the novel task of asking multimodal clarifying questions in open-domain, mixed-initiative conversational search systems. To facilitate research into this task, we collect a dataset named Melon that contains over 4k multimodal clarifying questions, enriched with over 14k images. We also propose a multimodal query clarification model named Marto and adopt a prompt-based, generative fine-tuning strategy to perform the training of different stages with different prompts. Several analyses are conducted to understand the importance of multimodal contents during the query clarification phase. Experimental results indicate that the addition of images leads to significant improvements of up to 90% in retrieval performance when selecting the relevant images. Extensive analyses are also performed to show the superiority of Marto compared with discriminative baselines in terms of effectiveness and efficiency.
title Asking Multimodal Clarifying Questions in Mixed-Initiative Conversational Search
topic Computation and Language
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.07742