Commonsense injection in conversational systems: an adaptable framework for query expansion

Recent advancements in conversational agents are leading a paradigm shift in how people search for their information needs, from text queries to entire spoken conversations. This paradigm shift poses a new challenge: a single question may lack the context driven by the entire conversation. We propose and evaluate a framework to deal with multi-turn conversations with the injection of commonsense knowledge. Specifically, we propose a novel approach for conversational search that uses pre-trained large language models and commonsense knowledge bases to enrich queries with relevant concepts. Our framework comprises a generator of candidate concepts related to the context of the conversation and a selector for deciding which candidate concept to add to the current utterance to improve retrieval effectiveness. We use the TREC CAsT datasets and ConceptNet to show that our framework improves retrieval performance by up to 82% in terms of Recall@200 and up to 154% in terms of NDCG@3 as compared to the performance achieved by the original utterances in the conversations.