Do Simulated Users Need to Remember? Analyzing the Impact of Memory Models in Conversational Search Evaluation
Abstract
Conversational search systems are typically evaluated using a fixed reference collection of conversations or through user studies with a live system. However, fixed-reference conversations can cover only a few plausible conversations, and user studies are costly, time-consuming, and often hard to reproduce. A promising alternative that avoids coverage and cost issues is user simulation, in which a computer program takes on the role of a user and interacts with the system under evaluation. But the complexity of human search behavior raises the question of how ''realistic'' the simulations actually need to be for reliable evaluations of conversational search systems. In this paper, we ask: Do simulated users need to remember? While real users may learn and forget information during conversational search sessions, which inspired previous research to also model memory capabilities in simulations, it remains unclear whether this actually influences the results of system evaluations. To investigate the impact of memory modeling, we analyze conversations of simulated users and of humans with four conversational search systems. Our results suggest that incorporating long-term memory into simulators can help reproduce system effectiveness rankings obtained from human conversations, whereas incorporating short-term memory can diminish the reproduction. We also find that simulators are generally valid and reproducible---and memory modeling even increases run-to-run reproducibility of system rankings---but overall, simulations approximate human evaluation scores better when ''helpful'' assistants are evaluated than when assistants with deteriorated response quality are assessed. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/webis-de/SIGIR-26.
Assigned reviewers
| # | Reviewer | Match | Why (closest evidence publications in the taxonomy) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Jaime Arguello | 55 | 76 The effects of goal-setting on learning during information seeking with generative AI (2026) User Behavior and Search Interaction 71 Learning assessments in search-as-learning: A survey of prior work and opportunities for future research (2022) User Behavior and Search Interaction 71 Goal-setting in support of learning during search: An exploration of learning outcomes and searcher perceptions (2023) User Behavior and Search Interaction |
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| 2 | Romain Deffayet | 49 | 71 Evaluating the Robustness of Click Models to Policy Distributional Shift (2023) User Behavior and Search Interaction 71 An Offline Metric for the Debiasedness of Click Models (2023) User Behavior and Search Interaction 39 SARDINE: Simulator for Automated Recommendation in Dynamic and Interactive Environments (2024) Recommendation Systems and Evaluation |
Area chair
| Area chair | Match | |
|---|---|---|
| Ziyi Ye | 52 |
Area-chair candidates (6)
| Ziyi Ye assigned | 52 | 14 papers | |
| Zhijing Wu 0001 | 38 | 9 papers | |
| Fernando Diaz 0001 | 34 | 12 papers | |
| Jun Xu 0001 | 33 | 2 papers | |
| Pengyue Jia | 32 | 10 papers | |
| Xiaoxue Zang | 31 | 4 papers |
Candidates from the panel ranked by match score
| # | Reviewer | Match | Load | Why | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Vuong Thanh Tung | 71 | 3 | 72 Spoken Conversational Context Improves Query Auto-completion in Web Search (2021) User Behavior and Search Interaction 71 Associating cognitive abilities with naturalistic search behavior (2025) User Behavior and Search Interaction |
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| 2 | Jiqun Liu | 69 | 3 | 71 Constructing and meta-evaluating state-aware evaluation metrics for interactive search systems (2023) User Behavior and Search Interaction 71 State-Aware Meta-Evaluation of Evaluation Metrics in Interactive Information Retrieval (2021) User Behavior and Search Interaction |
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| 3 | Sara Allawati | 69 | 3 | 71 From Lab to Reality: An Eye-tracking Study of How Users are Influenced to Search in the Era of GenAI (2026) User Behavior and Search Interaction 71 What do Users Really Ask Large Language Models? An Initial Log Analysis of Google Bard Interactions in the Wild (2024) User Behavior and Search Interaction |
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| 4 | Fan Zhang 0053 | 63 | 3 | 76 How Users Interact with Generative Information Retrieval Systems: A Study of User Behavior and Search Experience (2025) User Behavior and Search Interaction 76 Conversational vs Traditional: Comparing Search Behavior and Outcome in Legal Case Retrieval (2021) User Behavior and Search Interaction |
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| 5 | Saber Zerhoudi COI: co-author | 61 | 3 | 88 Beyond the Click: A Framework for Inferring Cognitive Traces in Search (2026) User Behavior and Search Interaction 76 From SERPs to Agents: A Platform for Comparative Studies of Information Interaction (2026) User Behavior and Search Interaction |
|
| 6 | Jaime Arguello assigned | 55 | 3 | 76 The effects of goal-setting on learning during information seeking with generative AI (2026) User Behavior and Search Interaction 71 Learning assessments in search-as-learning: A survey of prior work and opportunities for future research (2022) User Behavior and Search Interaction |
|
| 8 | Romain Deffayet assigned | 49 | 3 | 71 Evaluating the Robustness of Click Models to Policy Distributional Shift (2023) User Behavior and Search Interaction 71 An Offline Metric for the Debiasedness of Click Models (2023) User Behavior and Search Interaction |
|
| 9 | Mark D. Smucker | 44 | 3 | 72 Time-based calibration of effectiveness measures (2012) User Behavior and Search Interaction 72 Evaluating Streams of Evolving News Events (2015) User Behavior and Search Interaction |
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| 10 | Falk Scholer | 43 | 3 | 69 Can Users Predict Relative Query Effectiveness? (2022) User Behavior and Search Interaction 68 Classifying Term Variants in Query Formulation (2025) User Behavior and Search Interaction |
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| 11 | Xuanhui Wang | 42 | 3 | 71 Cross-Positional Attention for Debiasing Clicks (2021) User Behavior and Search Interaction 67 Learning with Sparse and Biased Feedback for Personal Search (2018) User Behavior and Search Interaction |
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| 12 | Paul Thomas 0001 | 40 | 3 | 72 User Models, Metrics and Measures of Search: A Tutorial on the C/W/L Evaluation Framework (2021) User Behavior and Search Interaction 71 Third Workshop on Building towards Information Interaction and Retrieval Resources Re-use (BIIRRR 2022) (2022) User Behavior and Search Interaction |
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| 13 | Leif Azzopardi | 39 | 3 | 72 User Models, Metrics and Measures of Search: A Tutorial on the C/W/L Evaluation Framework (2021) User Behavior and Search Interaction 69 Query quality: user ratings and system predictions (2010) User Behavior and Search Interaction |
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| 15 | Zhen Qin 0001 | 35 | 3 | 67 Cross-Positional Attention for Debiasing Clicks (2021) User Behavior and Search Interaction 67 Revisiting Two-tower Models for Unbiased Learning to Rank (2022) User Behavior and Search Interaction |
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| 16 | Tetsuya Sakai | 35 | 3 | 40 Diversified search evaluation: lessons from the NTCIR-9 INTENT task (2013) Evaluation Metrics and User Models 40 Summaries, ranked retrieval and sessions: a unified framework for information access evaluation (2013) Evaluation Metrics and User Models |
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| 17 | Bo Peng 0009 | 34 | 3 | 63 SWaT: Statistical Modeling of Video Watch Time through User Behavior Analysis (2025) User Behavior and Search Interaction 32 eCeLLM: Generalizing Large Language Models for E-commerce from Large-scale, High-quality Instruction Data (2024) Efficiency and Deployment |
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| 18 | Shuaiqiang Wang | 34 | 3 | 67 RankExpert: A Mixture of Textual-and-Behavioral Experts for Multi-Objective Learning-to-Rank in Web Search (2025) User Behavior and Search Interaction 66 M2oERank: Multi-Objective Mixture-of-Experts Enhanced Ranking for Satisfaction-Oriented Web Search (2025) User Behavior and Search Interaction |
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| 19 | Xiao Zhang 0034 | 34 | 3 | 37 Similarity = Value? Consultation Value-Assessment and Alignment for Personalized Search (2025) Personalized and Context-Aware Retrieval 36 UniSAR: Modeling User Transition Behaviors between Search and Recommendation (2024) Recommendation with Search and Ranking |
|
| 20 | Yujia Zhou 0002 | 34 | 3 | 68 Intent-Oriented Dynamic Interest Modeling for Personalized Web Search (2024) User Behavior and Search Interaction 68 Incorporating Explicit Subtopics in Personalized Search (2023) User Behavior and Search Interaction |
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| 23 | Chongming Gao | 33 | 3 | 50 Agentic Feedback Loop Modeling Improves Recommendation and User Simulation (2025) User Profile and Persona Modeling 38 KuaiRec: A Fully-observed Dataset and Insights for Evaluating Recommender Systems (2022) Recommendation Systems and Evaluation |
|
| 24 | Gustavo Penha | 33 | 3 | 63 As It Was: Aligning LLM Search Evaluation with Historical User Preferences (2026) User Behavior and Search Interaction 38 Contextualizing Spotify's Audiobook List Recommendations with Descriptive Shelves (2025) Recommendation Systems and Evaluation |
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| 25 | Yifan Wang 0017 | 33 | 3 | 76 User Perception of Recommendation Explanation: Are Your Explanations What Users Need? (2023) User Behavior and Search Interaction 29 Improving Long-tail User CTR Prediction via Hierarchical Distribution Alignment (2025) Bias Mitigation Methods |
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| 26 | Yang Song 0008 | 33 | 3 | 72 Query-Less: Predicting Task Repetition for NextGen Proactive Search and Recommendation Engines (2016) User Behavior and Search Interaction 38 LabelCraft: Empowering Short Video Recommendations with Automated Label Crafting (2024) Recommendation Systems and Evaluation |
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| 27 | Shuchang Liu 0001 | 33 | 3 | 52 LLM-Powered User Simulator for Recommender System (2025) Recommendation Systems and Evaluation 52 KuaiSim: A Comprehensive Simulator for Recommender Systems (2023) Recommendation Systems and Evaluation |
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| 28 | Han Li 0005 | 33 | 3 | 60 Lasso: Large Language Model-based User Simulator for Cross-Domain Recommendation (2025) User Simulation for Interactive Systems 38 RecFlow: An Industrial Full Flow Recommendation Dataset (2025) Recommendation Systems and Evaluation |
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| 29 | Yuta Saito | 32 | 3 | 39 Evaluating the Robustness of Off-Policy Evaluation (2021) Recommendation Systems and Evaluation 37 Off-Policy Evaluation of Ranking Policies under Diverse User Behavior (2023) Recommendation with Search and Ranking |
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| 30 | Sunhao Dai | 32 | 3 | 76 NExT-Search: Rebuilding User Feedback Ecosystem for Generative AI Search (2025) User Behavior and Search Interaction 33 AdaO2B: Adaptive Online to Batch Conversion for Out-of-Distribution Generalization (2025) Long-Term Engagement and Retention Optimization |
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| 31 | Theresia Veronika Rampisela | 32 | 3 | 32 Measuring Individual User Fairness with User Similarity and Effectiveness Disparity (2026) Fairness Metrics and Evaluation 32 Relevance-aware Individual Item Fairness Measures for Recommender Systems: Limitations and Usage Guidelines (2026) Fairness Metrics and Evaluation |
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| 33 | Idan Szpektor | 31 | 3 | 71 Predicting web searcher satisfaction with existing community-based answers (2011) User Behavior and Search Interaction 36 Identifying Web Queries with Question Intent (2016) Personalized and Context-Aware Retrieval |
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| 34 | Yimeng Bai | 31 | 3 | 38 Leveraging Watch-time Feedback for Short-Video Recommendations: A Causal Labeling Framework (2023) Recommendation Systems and Evaluation 38 LabelCraft: Empowering Short Video Recommendations with Automated Label Crafting (2024) Recommendation Systems and Evaluation |
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| 35 | Zechun Niu | 31 | 3 | 31 Investigating the Robustness of Counterfactual Learning to Rank Models: A Reproducibility Study (2025) Unbiased Learning to Rank 31 Addressing Personalized Bias for Unbiased Learning to Rank (2025) Unbiased Learning to Rank |