Personal assistant systems, such as Apple Siri, Google Now, Amazon Alexa, and Microsoft Cortana, are becoming ever more widely used. Understanding user intent such as clarification questions, potential answers and user feedback in information-seeking conversations is critical for retrieving good responses. In this paper, we analyze user intent patterns in information-seeking conversations and propose an intent-aware neural response ranking model ``IART'', which refers to ``Intent-Aware Ranking with Transformers''. IART is built on top of the integration of user intent modeling and language representation learning with the Transformer architecture, which relies entirely on a self-attention mechanism instead of recurrent nets. It incorporates intent-aware utterance attention to derive an importance weighting scheme of utterances in conversation context with the aim of better conversation history understanding. We conduct extensive experiments with three information-seeking conversation data sets including both standard benchmarks and commercial data. Our proposed model outperforms all baseline methods with respect to a variety of metrics. We also perform case studies and analysis of learned user intent and its impact on response ranking in information-seeking conversations to provide interpretation of results. Our research findings provide insights on intent-aware neural ranking models based on Transformers for response selection, and have implications for the design of the next generation of information-seeking conversation systems.
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Analyzing and Characterizing User Intent in Information-seeking Conversations
Understanding and characterizing how people interact in information-seeking conversations will be a crucial component in developing effective conversational search systems. In this paper, we introduce a new dataset designed for this purpose and use it to analyze information-seeking conversations by user intent distribution, co-occurrence, and flow patterns. The MSDialog dataset is a labeled conversation dataset of question answering (QA) interactions between information seekers and providers from an online forum on Microsoft products. The dataset contains more than 2,000 multi-turn QA dialogs with 10,000 utterances that are annotated with user intents on the utterance level. Annotations were done using crowdsourcing. With MSDialog, we find some highly recurring patterns in user intent during an information-seeking process. They could be useful for designing conversational search systems. We will make our dataset freely available to encourage exploration of information-seeking conversation models.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1715095
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10090129
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the 41st International ACM SIGIR Conference onResearch and Development in Information Retrieval
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 989 to 992
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3209978.3210124
