InstructoR: Instructing Unsupervised Conversational Dense Retrieval with Large Language Models
Submission Type: Regular Long Paper
Submission Track: Information Retrieval and Text Mining
Submission Track 2: Dialogue and Interactive Systems
Keywords: Conversational Dense Retrieval, Unsupervised Information Retrieval, Large Language Models
TL;DR: To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to utilize LLMs to improve conversational dense retrieval in an unsupervised manner.
Abstract: Compared to traditional single-turn ad-hoc retrieval, conversational retrieval needs to handle the multi-turn conversation and understand the user’s real query intent. However, most existing methods simply fine-tune the pre-trained ad-hoc retriever on limited supervised data, making it challenging for the retriever to fully grasp the entirety of the conversation. In this paper, we find that large language models (LLMs) can accurately discover the user’s query intent from the complex conversation context and provide the supervised signal to instruct the retriever in an unsupervised manner. Therefore, we propose a novel method termed InstructoR to Instruct unsupervised conversational dense Retrieval with LLMs. We design an unsupervised training framework that employs LLMs to estimate the session-passage relevance score as the soft label to guide the retriever's training. Specially, we devise three instructing strategies from context, query and response perspectives to calculate the relevance score more precisely, including conversational retrieval as conversation generation, question rewrite as latent variable and question response as posterior guide. Experimental results show InstructoR can bring significant improvements across various ad-hoc retrievers, even surpassing the current supervised state-of-the-art method. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of our method under low-resource and zero-shot settings. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/jinzhuoran/InstructoR/.
Submission Number: 37
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