A Spatial Approach to Predict Performance of Conversational Search Systems

Recent advancements in Information Retrieval and Natural Language Processing have led to significant developments in the way users interact with search engines, with traditional one-shot textual queries being replaced by multi-turn conversations. As a highly interactive search scenario, Conversational Search (CS) can significantly benefit from Query Performance Prediction (QPP) techniques. However, the application of QPP in the CS domain is a relatively new field and requires proper framing. This study proposes a set of spatial-based QPP models, designed to work effectively in the conversational search domain, where dense neural retrieval models are the most common approach and query cutoffs are small. The proposed QPP approaches are shown to improve the predictive performance over the state-of-the-art in different scenarios and collections, highlighting the utility of QPP in the CS domain.