Conversational Question Answering for Scientific Domains


Project Title: Conversational Information Seeking

Professor: Hamed Zamani

Lab/Research Group: Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval (CIIR)

Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval (CIIR) is a world leading research lab in information retrieval. CIIR's projects include many aspects of developing and evaluating search engines, question answering systems, and recommender systems. The current projects of the Center include but are not limited to neural information retrieval, conversational information seeking, controversy detection, and cross-lingual information retrieval. For more information, visit the Center's website at http://ciir.cs.umass.edu/



Intelligent assistants, such as Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, and Google Assistant, have attracted much attention in industry. However, currently they are only able to successfully respond to a few types of requests. For instance, they are incapable of addressing several information seeking tasks. In this project, we focus on conversational information seeking tasks, including conversational search, recommendation, and/or question answering.


The assigned team would be responsible to learn how to use Macaw, an open-source platform for conversational information seeking research, and further improve the platform by implementing state-of-the-art solutions for a number of conversational information seeking tasks. The outcome of this project will be released as an open-source extension to Macaw and may be published. Programming experiences in Python is a requirement for this project.

For more information, please see the github page for the Macaw project: https://github.com/microsoft/macaw