# Conversational Information Seeking

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.08808 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08808/

## Key facts

- Cited by 37 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 21 Jan 2022.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [Prompting and Evaluating Large Language Models for Proactive Dialogues: Clarification, Target-guided, and Non-collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13626/) (2023)
- [Leveraging Large Language Models in Conversational Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.07961/) (2023)
- [Towards Human-centered Proactive Conversational Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12670/) (2024)
- [PACIFIC: Towards Proactive Conversational Question Answering over Tabular and Textual Data in Finance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08817/) (2022)
- [Large Language Model Augmented Narrative Driven Recommendations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02250/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Recent Advances in Conversational Data Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.13003/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Conversational Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15576/) (2024)
- [Are Generative AI Agents Effective Personalized Financial Advisors?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.05862/) (2025)
- [Query Performance Prediction: From Ad-hoc to Conversational Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10923/) (2023)
- [GINGER: Grounded Information Nugget-Based Generation of Responses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18174/) (2025)
- [Alexa, Let's Work Together: Introducing the First Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge on Conversational Task Assistance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.06321/) (2022)
- [Social Learning: Towards Collaborative Learning with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.11441/) (2023)
- [Zero-shot Clarifying Question Generation for Conversational Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12660/) (2023)
- [Aligning Query Representation with Rewritten Query and Relevance Judgments in Conversational Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.20189/) (2024)
- [Talk the Walk: Synthetic Data Generation for Conversational Music Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11489/) (2023)
- [Semantic Parsing for Conversational Question Answering over Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12217/) (2023)
- [ConvSDG: Session Data Generation for Conversational Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11335/) (2024)
- [Conversational Gold: Evaluating Personalized Conversational Search System using Gold Nuggets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09902/) (2025)
- [Conversational Search: From Fundamentals to Frontiers in the LLM Era](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.10635/) (2025)
- [Beyond Single Items: Exploring User Preferences in Item Sets with the Conversational Playlist Curation Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06791/) (2023)
- [Query Understanding in the Age of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16004/) (2023)
- [Simulating Task-Oriented Dialogues with State Transition Graphs and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14772/) (2024)
- [OPERA: Harmonizing Task-Oriented Dialogs and Information Seeking Experience](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.12449/) (2022)
- [Zero-Shot and Efficient Clarification Need Prediction in Conversational Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.00179/) (2025)
- [Data Augmentation for Conversational AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.04739/) (2023)
- [Preference-based Learning with Retrieval Augmented Generation for Conversational Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22303/) (2025)
- [What Types of Questions Require Conversation to Answer? A Case Study of AskReddit Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17710/) (2023)
- [Rating Prediction in Conversational Task Assistants with Behavioral and Conversational-Flow Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11307/) (2023)
- [Panmodal Information Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.12923/) (2024)
- [Personality over Precision: Exploring the Influence of Human-Likeness on ChatGPT Use for Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.06447/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Conversational information seeking (CIS) is concerned with a sequence of interactions between one or more users and an information system. Interactions in CIS are primarily based on natural language dialogue, while they may include other types of interactions, such as click, touch, and body gestures. This monograph provides a thorough overview of CIS definitions, applications, interactions, interfaces, design, implementation, and evaluation. This monograph views CIS applications as including conversational search, conversational question answering, and conversational recommendation. Our aim is to provide an overview of past research related to CIS, introduce the current state-of-the-art in CIS, highlight the challenges still being faced in the community. and suggest future directions.