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Investigating Conversational Search Behavior for Domain Exploration

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Advances in Information Retrieval (ECIR 2023)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 13981))

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Abstract

Conversational search has evolved as a new information retrieval paradigm, marking a shift from traditional search systems towards interactive dialogues with intelligent search agents. This change especially affects exploratory information-seeking contexts, where conversational search systems can guide the discovery of unfamiliar domains. In these scenarios, users find it often difficult to express their information goals due to insufficient background knowledge. Conversational interfaces can provide assistance by eliciting information needs and narrowing down the search space. However, due to the complexity of information-seeking behavior, the design of conversational interfaces for retrieving information remains a great challenge. Although prior work has employed user studies to empirically ground the system design, most existing studies are limited to well-defined search tasks or known domains, thus being less exploratory in nature. Therefore, we conducted a laboratory study to investigate open-ended search behavior for navigation through unknown information landscapes. The study comprised of 26 participants who were restricted in their search to a text chat interface. Based on the collected dialogue transcripts, we applied statistical analyses and process mining techniques to uncover general information-seeking patterns across five different domains. We not only identify core dialogue acts and their interrelations that enable users to discover domain knowledge, but also derive design suggestions for conversational search systems.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Repository: https://github.com/sebischair/conversational-domain-exploration-data.

  2. 2.

    PM4Py process mining package: https://pm4py.fit.fraunhofer.de.

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Acknowledgments

This work has been supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) Software Campus grant 01IS17049.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Technical University of Munich, Munich, Germany

    Phillip Schneider, Anum Afzal, Juraj Vladika & Florian Matthes

  2. University of Twente, Enschede, Netherlands

    Daniel Braun

Authors
  1. Phillip Schneider
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  2. Anum Afzal
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  3. Juraj Vladika
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  4. Daniel Braun
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  5. Florian Matthes
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Phillip Schneider .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Jaap Kamps

  2. Université Grenoble-Alpes, Saint-Martin-d’Hères, France

    Lorraine Goeuriot

  3. Università della Svizzera Italiana, Lugano, Switzerland

    Fabio Crestani

  4. University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Maria Maistro

  5. University of Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan

    Hideo Joho

  6. Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland

    Brian Davis

  7. Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland

    Cathal Gurrin

  8. Universität Regensburg, Regensburg, Germany

    Udo Kruschwitz

  9. Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland

    Annalina Caputo

A Appendix

A Appendix

Table 3. Overview of the five domain datasets used in the experiment.
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Schneider, P., Afzal, A., Vladika, J., Braun, D., Matthes, F. (2023). Investigating Conversational Search Behavior for Domain Exploration. In: Kamps, J., et al. Advances in Information Retrieval. ECIR 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13981. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28238-6_52

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28238-6_52

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-28237-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-28238-6

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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