VACOS 2 - Natural language and conversational support for object search

VACOS项目的目的是提供更好的支持，以自然语言制定模糊的信息需求的搜索。我们考虑两个用例：产品搜索和研究数据搜索。在项目的第一阶段，我们以人为本的开发流程专注于分析用户上下文，创建具有自然语言信息需求的数据集，丰富具有主题和自然语言属性的数据集，并开发对象搜索的原型。项目第一阶段的结果表明，不仅在最初的搜索过程中，而且在解释搜索结果及其与所提出的搜索请求之间的关系方面，都有必要向搜索者作出解释。因此，研究领域的概念“对话搜索”和“可解释的搜索”将被用于第二个项目阶段。首先，对象元数据将被丰富，以生成更好地匹配用自然语言表述的信息需求的对象表示。在此基础上，将开发混合主动的自然语言搜索对话。对于搜索结果的呈现，将研究各种表示形式，重点是简洁性和可解释性。将针对所制定的搜索请求以及与其他发现的对象的比较来解释单个结果项。在这个拟议项目的背景下，在第一个项目阶段开发的原型将通过新的对话和解释组件进行扩展。以人为中心的评估将进行检查对象搜索的自然语言和会话支持。

The VACOS project aims to provide better support for searchers with vague information needs formulated in natural language. We consider two use cases: product search and research data search. In the first phase of the project, our human-centered development process focused on analyzing the user context, creating datasets with natural language information needs, enriching datasets with topical and natural language attributes, and developing prototypes for object search. The results of the first project phase have shown the necessity to searchers not only during the initial search process but also to explain search results and their relation to the formulated search request. Therefore, concepts of the research areas "Conversational Search" and "Explainable Search" will be used in the second project phase. First, object metadata will be enriched to generate object representations that better match information needs formulated in natural language. Based on this, mixed-initiative natural language search dialogues will be developed. For the presentation of search results, various representation forms will be investigated, focusing on vagueness and explainability. Single result items will be explained with respect to the formulated search request as well as in comparison to other found objects. In the context of this proposed project, the prototypes developed in the first project phase will be extended by new dialog and explanation components. Human-centered evaluations will be conducted to examine natural language and conversational supports for object search.