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arXiv · 1912.08904

Macaw: An Extensible Conversational Information Seeking Platform

Hamed Zamani·Nick Craswell
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Abstract

Conversational information seeking (CIS) has been recognized as a major emerging research area in information retrieval. Such research will require data and tools, to allow the implementation and study of conversational systems. This paper introduces Macaw, an open-source framework with a modular architecture for CIS research. Macaw supports multi-turn, multi-modal, and mixed-initiative interactions, and enables research for tasks such as document retrieval, question answering, recommendation, and structured data exploration. It has a modular design to encourage the study of new CIS algorithms, which can be evaluated in batch mode. It can also integrate with a user interface, which allows user studies and data collection in an interactive mode, where the back end can be fully algorithmic or a wizard of oz setup. Macaw is distributed under the MIT License.

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Hamed Zamani, Nick Craswell. 2019-12-18. Macaw: An Extensible Conversational Information Seeking Platform. https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.08904

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