CONQRR: Conversational Query Rewriting for Retrieval with Reinforcement Learning

12/16/2021
by   Zeqiu Wu, et al.
0

For open-domain conversational question answering (CQA), it is important to retrieve the most relevant passages to answer a question, but this is challenging compared with standard passage retrieval because it requires understanding the full dialogue context rather than a single query. Moreover, it can be expensive to re-train well-established retrievers such as search engines that are originally developed for non-conversational queries. To facilitate their use, we develop a query rewriting model CONQRR that rewrites a conversational question in context into a standalone question. It is trained with a novel reward function to directly optimize towards retrieval and can be adapted to any fixed blackbox retriever using reinforcement learning. We show that CONQRR achieves state-of-the-art results on a recent open-domain CQA dataset, a combination of conversations from three different sources. We also conduct extensive experiments to show the effectiveness of CONQRR for any given fixed retriever.

READ FULL TEXT

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset