Simulating Follow-up Questions in Conversational Search

Johannes Kiesel, Marcel Gohsen, Nailia Mirzakhmedova, Matthias Hagen, Benno Stein

Abstract: Evaluating conversational search systems based on simulated user interactions is a potential approach to overcome one of the main problems of static conversational search test collections: the collections contain only very few of all the plausible conversations on a topic. Still, one of the challenges of user simulation is generating realistic follow-up questions on given outputs of a conversational system. We propose to address this challenge by using state-of-the-art language models and find that: (1) on two conversational search datasets, the tested models generate questions that are semantically similar to those in the datasets, especially when tuned for follow-up questions; (2) the generated questions are mostly valid, related, informative, and specific according to human assessment; and (3) for influencing the characteristics of the simulated questions, small changes to the prompt are insufficient.