Asking Multimodal Clarifying Questions in Mixed-Initiative Conversational Search

In mixed-initiative conversational search systems, clarifying questions are used to help users who struggle to express their intentions in a single query. These questions aim to uncover user's information needs and resolve query ambiguities. We hypothesize that in scenarios where multimodal information is pertinent, the clarification process can be improved by using non-textual information. Therefore, we propose to add images to clarifying questions and formulate the novel task of asking multimodal clarifying questions in open-domain, mixed-initiative conversational search systems. To …

aim conversational conversational search cs.cl cs.cv express information mixed multimodal process query questions search struggle systems