Conversational Semantic Search: Looking BeyondWeb Search, Q&A and Dialog Systems
- Paul A. Crook ,
- Alex Marin ,
- Vipul Agarwal ,
- Samantha Anderson ,
- Ohyoung Jang ,
- Aliasgar Lanewala ,
- Karthik Tangirala ,
- Imed Zitouni
The 11th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Minining (WSDM 2018) |
Published by ACM
User expectations of web search are changing. They are expecting search engines to answer questions, to be more conversational, and to offer means to complete tasks on their behalf. At the same time, to increase the breadth of tasks that personal digital assistants (PDAs), such as Microsoft’s Cortana or Amazon’s Alexa, are capable of, PDAs need to better utilize information about the world, a significant amount of which is available in the knowledge bases and answers built for search engines. It thus seems likely that the underlying systems that power web search and PDAs will converge. This demonstration presents a system that merges elements of traditional multi-turn dialog systems with web based question answering. This demo focuses on the automatic composition of semantic functional units, Botlets, to generate responses to user’s natural language (NL) queries. We show that such a system can be trained to combine information from search engine answers with PDA tasks to enable new user experiences.
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