Search-Oriented Conversational AI (SCAI) is an established venue that regularly puts a spotlight upon the recent work advancing the field of conversational search. SCAI’21 was organised as an independent online event and featured a shared task on conversational question answering, on which this paper reports. The shared task featured three subtasks that correspond to three steps in conversational question answering: question rewriting, passage retrieval, and answer generation. This report discusses each subtask, but emphasizes the answer generation subtask as it attracted the most attention from the participants and we identified evaluation of answer correctness in the conversational settings as a major challenge and acurrent research gap. Alongside the automatic evaluation, we conducted two crowdsourcing experiments to collect annotations for answer plausibility and faithfulness. As a result of this shared task, the original conversational QA dataset used for evaluation was further extended with alternative correct answers produced by the participant systems.

We introduce and study the task of clickbait spoiling: generating a short text that satisfies the curiosity induced by a clickbait post. Clickbait links to a web page and advertises its contents by arousing curiosity instead of providing an informative summary. Our contributions are approaches to classify the type of spoiler needed (i.e., a phrase or a passage), and to generate appropriate spoilers. A large-scale evaluation and error analysis on a new corpus of 5,000 manually spoiled clickbait posts—the Webis Clickbait Spoiling Corpus 2022—shows that our spoiler type classifier achieves an accuracy of 80%, while the question answering model DeBERTa-large outperforms all others in generating spoilers for both types.