As a primary means of information acquisition, information retrieval (IR) systems, such as search engines, have integrated themselves into our daily lives. These systems also serve as components of dialogue, question-answering, and recommender systems. The trajectory of IR has evolved dynamically from its origins in term-based methods to its integration with advanced neural models. While the neural models excel at capturing complex contextual signals and semantic nuances, they still face challenges such as data scarcity, interpretability, and the generation of contextually plausible yet potentially inaccurate responses. This evolution requires a combination of traditional methods (such as term-based sparse retrieval methods with rapid response) and modern neural architectures (such as language models with powerful language understanding capacity). Meanwhile, the emergence of large language models (LLMs) has revolutionized natural language processing due to their remarkable language understanding, generation, and reasoning abilities. Consequently, recent research has sought to leverage LLMs to improve IR systems. Given the rapid evolution of this research trajectory, it is necessary to consolidate existing methodologies and provide nuanced insights through a comprehensive overview. In this survey, we delve into the confluence of LLMs and IR systems, including crucial aspects such as query rewriters, retrievers, rerankers, readers, and search agents.

Active understanding and clarification of user intent is crucial for information-seeking systems based on Large Language Models (LLMs), as it enhances search efficiency and improves user experience for human-LLM interaction. While existing systems rely on domain-specific resources to generate clarifying questions, they face challenges when extended to open-domain scenarios due to the lack of human-LLM clarification data. In this paper, we propose ClariLM to synthesize large-scale clarification data and enhance the LLMs' clarification capability. Specifically, we design two key stages to prepare data: first, given a user question, the Clarification Facet Detection (CFD) stage employs a facet mining model learned from human-LLM conversation logs to predict realistic potential clarification candidates. Additionally, it incorporates direct predictions from powerful LLMs as supplements to guarantee comprehensive facet coverage. While CFD ensures high recall of facet candidates, the subsequent Optimal Facet Selection (OFS) stage synthesizes a set of new questions and employs a reasoning model to annotate the optimal facet for each question, which further improves the precision of ClariLM in clarification necessity prediction and optimal facet selection. The collected data are then applied for supervised fine-tuning, followed by constructing preference data for preference optimization. Experiments on our custom test set and two public benchmarks demonstrate that ClariLM significantly outperforms various baseline models across clarification necessity, clarifying question quality, and GPT-4-based comparative evaluation.

Search clarification is a critical user interface for open-domain conversational Web search, where generating high-quality facets for ambiguous or multi-facet queries significantly guides disambiguation and enhances the user's interaction experience. Recently, in-context learning with Large Language Models (LLMs) has emerged as a promising approach for facet generation by leveraging static or similarity-based demonstrations as prompts. However, existing methods predominantly rely on query similarity, failing to account for the multi-dimensional nature of query intents. This limitation can lead LLMs to generate incorrect or suboptimal facets misaligned with user needs. To address this challenge, we propose an intent-covering framework that improves clarification facet generation by selecting demonstrations that comprehensively cover the diverse intents underlying a given query. Specifically, we first train a generative model with beam search to predict potential intents and construct an intent-document graph to capture their semantic relationships. We then introduce a heuristic greedy algorithm that optimizes demonstration selection by maximizing intent coverage. Furthermore, since the order of demonstrations significantly affects generation quality, we develop a re-ranking model to optimize their sequence for better contextual alignment. Experiments demonstrate the superiority of our approach over strong baselines in various lexical and semantic evaluation metrics. Additionally, we conduct an in-depth analysis of how the number, order, and contextual relevance of demonstrations influence generation performance.

As a cornerstone of modern information access, search engines have become indispensable in everyday life. With the rapid advancements in AI and natural language processing (NLP) technologies, particularly large language models (LLMs), search engines have evolved to support more intuitive and intelligent interactions between users and systems. Conversational search, an emerging paradigm for next-generation search engines, leverages natural language dialogue to facilitate complex and precise information retrieval, thus attracting significant attention. Unlike traditional keyword-based search engines, conversational search systems enhance user experience by supporting intricate queries, maintaining context over multi-turn interactions, and providing robust information integration and processing capabilities. Key components such as query reformulation, search clarification, conversational retrieval, and response generation work in unison to enable these sophisticated interactions. In this survey, we explore the recent advancements and potential future directions in conversational search, examining the critical modules that constitute a conversational search system. We highlight the integration of LLMs in enhancing these systems and discuss the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead in this dynamic field. Additionally, we provide insights into real-world applications and robust evaluations of current conversational search systems, aiming to guide future research and development in conversational search.

Cloud solutions have gained significant popularity in the technology industry as they offer a combination of services and tools to tackle specific problems. However, despite their widespread use, the task of identifying appropriate company customers for a specific target solution to the sales team of a solution provider remains a complex business problem that existing matching systems have yet to adequately address. In this work, we study the B2B solution matching problem and identify two main challenges of this scenario: (1) the modeling of complex multi-field features and (2) the limited, incomplete, and sparse transaction data. To tackle these challenges, we propose a framework CAMA, which is built with a hierarchical multi-field matching structure as its backbone and supplemented by three data augmentation strategies and a contrastive pre-training objective to compensate for the imperfections in the available data. Through extensive experiments on a real-world dataset, we demonstrate that CAMA outperforms several strong baseline matching models significantly. Furthermore, we have deployed our matching framework on a system of Huawei Cloud. Our observations indicate an improvement of about 30% compared to the previous online model in terms of Conversion Rate (CVR), which demonstrates its great business value.

Modeling contextual information in a search session has drawn more and more attention when understanding complex user intents. Recent methods are all data-driven, i.e., they train different models on large-scale search log data to identify the relevance between search contexts and candidate documents. The common training paradigm is to pair the search context with different candidate documents and train the model to rank the clicked documents higher than the unclicked ones. However, this paradigm neglects the symmetric nature of the relevance between the session context and document, i.e., the clicked documents can also be paired with different search contexts when training. In this work, we propose query-oriented data augmentation to enrich search logs and empower the modeling. We generate supplemental training pairs by altering the most important part of a search context, i.e., the current query, and train our model to rank the generated sequence along with the original sequence. This approach enables models to learn that the relevance of a document may vary as the session context changes, leading to a better understanding of users’ search patterns. We develop several strategies to alter the current query, resulting in new training data with varying degrees of difficulty. Through experimentation on two extensive public search logs, we have successfully demonstrated the effectiveness of our model.

Recent studies show that historical behaviors (such as queries and their clicks) contained in a search session can benefit the ranking performance of subsequent queries in the session. Existing neural context-aware ranking models usually rank documents based on either latent representations of user search behaviors or the word-level interactions between the candidate document and each historical behavior in the search session. However, these two kinds of models both have their own drawbacks. Representation-based models neglect fine-grained information on word-level interactions, whereas interaction-based models suffer from the length restriction of session sequence because of the large cost of word-level interactions. To complement the limitations of these two kinds of models, we propose a unified context-aware document ranking model that takes full advantage of both representation and interaction. Specifically, instead of matching a candidate document with every single historical query in a session, we encode the session history into a latent representation and use this representation to enhance the current query and the candidate document. We then just match the enhanced query and candidate document with several matching components to capture the fine-grained information of word-level interactions. Rich experiments on two public query logs prove the effectiveness and efficiency of our model for leveraging representation and interaction.

Contextual information in search sessions is important for capturing users' search intents. Various approaches have been proposed to model user behavior sequences to improve document ranking in a session. Typically, training samples of (search context, document) pairs are sampled randomly in each training epoch. In reality, the difficulty to understand user's search intent and to judge document's relevance varies greatly from one search context to another. Mixing up training samples of different difficulties may confuse the model's optimization process. In this work, we propose a curriculum learning framework for context-aware document ranking, in which the ranking model learns matching signals between the search context and the candidate document in an easy-to-hard manner. In so doing, we aim to guide the model gradually toward a global optimum. To leverage both positive and negative examples, two curricula are designed. Experiments on two real query log datasets show that our proposed framework can improve the performance of several existing methods significantly, demonstrating the effectiveness of curriculum learning for context-aware document ranking.

Users' search tasks have become increasingly complicated, requiring multiple queries and interactions with the results. Recent studies have demonstrated that modeling the historical user behaviors in a session can help understand the current search intent. Existing context-aware ranking models primarily encode the current session sequence (from the first behavior to the current query) and compute the ranking score using the high-level representations. However, there is usually some noise in the current session sequence (useless behaviors for inferring the search intent) that may affect the quality of the encoded representations. To help the encoding of the current user behavior sequence, we propose to use a decoder and the information of future sequences and a supplemental query. Specifically, we design three generative tasks that can help the encoder to infer the actual search intent: (1) predicting future queries, (2) predicting future clicked documents, and (3) predicting a supplemental query. We jointly learn the ranking task with these generative tasks using an encoder-decoder structured approach. Extensive experiments on two public search logs demonstrate that our model outperforms all existing baselines, and the designed generative tasks can actually help the ranking task. Besides, additional experiments also show that our approach can be easily applied to various Transformer-based encoder-decoder models and improve their performance.