ICR: Iterative Clarification and Rewriting for Conversational Search

Zhiyu Cao, Peifeng Li, Qiaoming Zhu


Abstract
Most previous work on Conversational Query Rewriting employs an end-to-end rewriting paradigm. However, this approach is hindered by the issue of multiple fuzzy expressions within the query, which complicates the simultaneous identification and rewriting of multiple positions. To address this issue, we propose a novel framework ICR (Iterative Clarification and Rewriting), an iterative rewriting scheme that pivots on clarification questions. Within this framework, the model alternates between generating clarification questions and rewritten queries. The experimental results show that our ICR can continuously improve retrieval performance in the clarification-rewriting iterative process, thereby achieving state-of-the-art performance on two popular datasets.
Anthology ID:
2025.emnlp-main.496
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Christos Christodoulopoulos, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Carolyn Rose, Violet Peng
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EMNLP
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
9821–9835
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.emnlp-main.496/
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Cite (ACL):
Zhiyu Cao, Peifeng Li, and Qiaoming Zhu. 2025. ICR: Iterative Clarification and Rewriting for Conversational Search. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 9821–9835, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
ICR: Iterative Clarification and Rewriting for Conversational Search (Cao et al., EMNLP 2025)
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