Relevance feedback techniques assume that users provide relevance judgments for the top k (usually 10) documents and then re-rank using a new query model based on those judgments. Even though this is effective, there has been little research recently on this topic because requiring users to provide substantial feedback on a result list is impractical in a typical web search scenario. In new environments such as voice-based search with smart home devices, however, feedback about result quality can potentially be obtained during users' interactions with the system. Since there are severe limitations on the length and number of results that can be presented in a single interaction in this environment, the focus should move from browsing result lists to iterative retrieval and from retrieving documents to retrieving answers. In this paper, we study iterative relevance feedback techniques with a focus on retrieving answer passages. We first show that iterative feedback can be at least as effective as the top-k approach on standard TREC collections, and more effective on answer passage collections. We then propose an iterative feedback model for answer passages based on semantic similarity at passage level and show that it can produce significant improvements compared to both word-based iterative feedback models and those based on term-level semantic similarity.
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Answer Interaction in Non-factoid Question Answering Systems
Information retrieval systems are evolving from document retrieval to answer retrieval. Web search logs provide large amounts of data about how people interact with ranked lists of documents, but very little is known about interaction with answer texts. In this paper, we use Amazon Mechanical Turk to investigate three answer presentation and interaction approaches in a non-factoid question answering setting. We find that people perceive and react to good and bad answers very differently, and can identify good answers relatively quickly. Our results provide the basis for further investigation of effective answer interaction and feedback methods.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1715095
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10092532
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR 19)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 249 to 253
- 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/10.1145/3295750.3298946
