VACOS 2 - Natural language and conversational support for object search

VACOS项目旨在为有用自然语言表述的模糊信息需求的搜索者提供更好的支持。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，我们以人为中心的开发过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，使用主题和自然语言属性丰富数据集，以及开发对象搜索的原型。第一个项目阶段的结果向搜索者表明，不仅在最初的搜索过程中，而且有必要解释搜索结果及其与拟定的搜索请求的关系。因此，研究领域“对话式搜索”和“可解释搜索”的概念将用于第二项目阶段。首先，将丰富对象元数据，以生成更好地匹配自然语言表达的信息需求的对象表示。在此基础上，将开发混合倡议的自然语言搜索对话。对于搜索结果的呈现，将调查各种表示形式，重点是模糊性和可解释性。将针对所制定的搜索请求以及与其他发现的对象进行比较来解释单个结果项。在这一拟议项目的背景下，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加以扩展。将进行以人为中心的评估，以检查自然语言和对对象搜索的对话支持。

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.