ConSearcher: Supporting Conversational Information Seeking in Online Communities with Member Personas
Shiwei Wu, Xinyue Chen, Yuheng Liu, Xingbo Wang, Qingyu Guo, Longfei Chen, Chuhan Shi, Zhenhui Peng

TL;DR
ConSearcher is an LLM-powered tool that uses dynamically generated member personas to enhance conversational search in online communities, improving information outcomes and user engagement.
Contribution
It introduces a novel approach of using member personas generated from user queries to support conversational information seeking in online communities.
Findings
ConSearcher significantly improved information-seeking outcomes.
Users showed higher engagement with ConSearcher.
Concerns about over-personalization were identified.
Abstract
Many people browse online communities to learn from others' experiences and opinions, e.g., for constructing travel plans. Conversational search powered by large language models (LLMs) could ease this information-seeking task, but it remains under-investigated within the online community. In this paper, we first conducted an exploratory study (N=10) that indicated the helpfulness of a classic conversational search tool and identified room for improvement. Then, we proposed ConSearcher, an LLM-powered tool with dynamically generated member personas based on user queries to facilitate conversational search in the community. In ConSearcher, users can clarify their interests by checking what a simulated member similar to them may ask and get responses from diverse members' perspectives. A within-subjects study (N=27) showed that compared to two conversational search baselines, ConSearcher…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
