Recent research on proactive conversational agents (PCAs) mainly focuses on improving
the system's capabilities in anticipating and planning action sequences to accomplish tasks …

Query performance prediction (QPP) is a core task in information retrieval. The QPP task is
to predict the retrieval quality of a search system for a query without relevance judgments …

Dialogue systems are designed to offer human users social support or functional services
through natural language interactions. Traditional conversation research has put significant …

Modern information-seeking systems are becoming more interactive, mainly through asking
Clarifying Questions (CQs) to refine users' information needs. System-generated CQs may …

Identifying the right moment for a system to take the initiative is essential to conversational
information seeking (CIS). Existing studies have extensively studied the clarification need …

Conversational search has seen increased recent attention in both the IR and NLP
communities. It seeks to clarify and solve users' search needs through multi-turn natural …

Given a conversation context, conversational question ranking (CQR) aims to select a
proper question from a candidate pool to clarify users' ambiguous information needs. Most …

Online shopping platforms, such as Amazon and AliExpress, are increasingly prevalent in
society, helping customers purchase products conveniently. With recent progress in natural …

In this work, we reason how focusing on Information Retrieval (IR) for children and involving
them in participatory studies would benefit the IR community. The Child Computer …

Clarifying questions are an integral component of modern information retrieval systems,
directly impacting user satisfaction and overall system performance. Poorly formulated …