Neural Approaches to Conversational Information Retrieval

Abstract: A conversational information retrieval (CIR) system is an information retrieval (IR) system with a conversational interface which allows users to interact with the system to seek information via multi-turn conversations of natural language (in spoken or written form). This tutorial surveys recent advances in CIR, focusing on neural approaches that have been developed in the last few years. We present (1) a typical architecture of a CIR system, (2) new tasks and applications which arise from the needs of developing such a system, in comparison with traditional keyword-based IR systems, (3) new methods of conversational question answering, and (4) case studies of several CIR systems developed in research communities and industry.