Exploring Rewriting Approaches for Different Conversational Tasks

TL;DR

This paper compares rewriting and fusion approaches for question rewriting in conversational assistants, showing that the best method depends on the specific task, with query rewriting excelling in question-answering and fusion in data visualization tasks.

Contribution

It systematically evaluates two rewriting approaches across different conversational tasks, providing insights into their suitability based on use case and data type.

Findings

Query rewriting performs best for conversational question-answering.

Fusion approach yields better results for data analysis and visualization tasks.

Performance varies with conversation length and task type.

Abstract

Conversational assistants often require a question rewriting algorithm that leverages a subset of past interactions to provide a more meaningful (accurate) answer to the user's question or request. However, the exact rewriting approach may often depend on the use case and application-specific tasks supported by the conversational assistant, among other constraints. In this paper, we systematically investigate two different approaches, denoted as rewriting and fusion, on two fundamentally different generation tasks, including a text-to-text generation task and a multimodal generative task that takes as input text and generates a visualization or data table that answers the user's question. Our results indicate that the specific rewriting or fusion approach highly depends on the underlying use case and generative task. In particular, we find that for a conversational question-answering assistant, the query rewriting approach performs best, whereas for a data analysis assistant that generates visualizations and data tables based on the user's conversation with the assistant, the fusion approach works best. Notably, we explore two datasets for the data analysis assistant use case, for short and long conversations, and we find that query fusion always performs better, whereas for the conversational text-based question-answering, the query rewrite approach performs best.