Template-guided Clarifying Question Generation for Web Search Clarification
Jian Wang, Wenjie Li
Abstract
Clarification has attracted much attention because of its many potential applications especially in Web search. Since search queries are very short, the underlying user intents are often ambiguous. This makes it challenging for search engines to return the appropriate results that pertain to the users' actual information needs. To address this issue, asking clarifying questions has been recognized as a critical technique. Although previous studies have analyzed the importance of asking to clarify, generating clarifying questions for Web search remains under-explored. In this paper, we tackle this problem in a template-guided manner. Our objective is jointly learning to select question templates and fill question slots, using Transformer-based networks. We conduct experiments on MIMICS, a collection of datasets containing real Web search queries sampled from Bing's search logs. Our method is demonstrated to achieve significant improvements over various competitive baselines.