CarMem: Enhancing Long-Term Memory in LLM Voice Assistants through Category-Bounding

In today's assistant landscape, personalisation enhances interactions, fosters long-term relationships, and deepens engagement. However, many systems struggle with retaining user preferences, leading to repetitive user requests and disengagement. Furthermore, the unregulated and opaque extraction of user preferences in industry applications raises significant concerns about privacy and trust, especially in regions with stringent regulations like Europe. In response to these challenges, we propose a long-term memory system for voice assistants, structured around predefined categories. This approach leverages Large Language Models to efficiently extract, store, and retrieve preferences within these categories, ensuring both personalisation and transparency. We also introduce a synthetic multi-turn, multi-session conversation dataset (CarMem), grounded in real industry data, tailored to an in-car voice assistant setting. Benchmarked on the dataset, our system achieves an F1-score of .78 to .95 in preference extraction, depending on category granularity. Our maintenance strategy reduces redundant preferences by 95% and contradictory ones by 92%, while the accuracy of optimal retrieval is at .87. Collectively, the results demonstrate the system's suitability for industrial applications.

Conversational Exploratory Search of Scholarly Publications Using Knowledge Graphs

Traditional search methods primarily depend on string matches, while semantic search targets concept-based matches by recognizing underlying intents and contextual meanings of search terms. Semantic search is particularly beneficial for discovering scholarly publications where differences in vocabulary between users' search terms and document content are common, often yielding irrelevant search results. Many scholarly search engines have adopted knowledge graphs to represent semantic relations between authors, publications, and research concepts. However, users may face challenges when navigating these graphical search interfaces due to the complexity and volume of data, which impedes their ability to discover publications effectively. To address this problem, we developed a conversational search system for exploring scholarly publications using a knowledge graph. We outline the methodical approach for designing and implementing the proposed system, detailing its architecture and functional components. To assess the system's effectiveness, we employed various performance metrics and conducted a human evaluation with 40 participants, demonstrating how the conversational interface compares against a graphical interface with traditional text search. The findings from our evaluation provide practical insights for advancing the design of conversational search systems.

Bridging Information Gaps in Dialogues With Grounded Exchanges Using Knowledge Graphs

Knowledge models are fundamental to dialogue systems for enabling conversational interactions, which require handling domain-specific knowledge. Ensuring effective communication in information-providing conversations entails aligning user understanding with the knowledge available to the system. However, dialogue systems often face challenges arising from semantic inconsistencies in how information is expressed in natural language compared to how it is represented within the system's internal knowledge. To address this problem, we study the potential of large language models for conversational grounding, a mechanism to bridge information gaps by establishing shared knowledge between dialogue participants. Our approach involves annotating human conversations across five knowledge domains to create a new dialogue corpus called BridgeKG. Through a series of experiments on this dataset, we empirically evaluate the capabilities of large language models in classifying grounding acts and identifying grounded information items within a knowledge graph structure. Our findings offer insights into how these models use in-context learning for conversational grounding tasks and common prediction errors, which we illustrate with examples from challenging dialogues. We discuss how the models handle knowledge graphs as a semantic layer between unstructured dialogue utterances and structured information items.

Engineering Conversational Search Systems: A Review of Applications, Architectures, and Functional Components

Conversational search systems enable information retrieval via natural language interactions, with the goal of maximizing users' information gain over multiple dialogue turns. The increasing prevalence of conversational interfaces adopting this search paradigm challenges traditional information retrieval approaches, stressing the importance of better understanding the engineering process of developing these systems. We undertook a systematic literature review to investigate the links between theoretical studies and technical implementations of conversational search systems. Our review identifies real-world application scenarios, system architectures, and functional components. We consolidate our results by presenting a layered architecture framework and explaining the core functions of conversational search systems. Furthermore, we reflect on our findings in light of the rapid progress in large language models, discussing their capabilities, limitations, and directions for future research.

MedREQAL: Examining Medical Knowledge Recall of Large Language Models via Question Answering

In recent years, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated an impressive ability to encode knowledge during pre-training on large text corpora. They can leverage this knowledge for downstream tasks like question answering (QA), even in complex areas involving health topics. Considering their high potential for facilitating clinical work in the future, understanding the quality of encoded medical knowledge and its recall in LLMs is an important step forward. In this study, we examine the capability of LLMs to exhibit medical knowledge recall by constructing a novel dataset derived from systematic reviews -- studies synthesizing evidence-based answers for specific medical questions. Through experiments on the new MedREQAL dataset, comprising question-answer pairs extracted from rigorous systematic reviews, we assess six LLMs, such as GPT and Mixtral, analyzing their classification and generation performance. Our experimental insights into LLM performance on the novel biomedical QA dataset reveal the still challenging nature of this task.

Towards Harnessing Large Language Models for Comprehension of Conversational Grounding

Conversational grounding is a collaborative mechanism for establishing mutual knowledge among participants engaged in a dialogue. This experimental study analyzes information-seeking conversations to investigate the capabilities of large language models in classifying dialogue turns related to explicit or implicit grounding and predicting grounded knowledge elements. Our experimental results reveal challenges encountered by large language models in the two tasks and discuss ongoing research efforts to enhance large language model-based conversational grounding comprehension through pipeline architectures and knowledge bases. These initiatives aim to develop more effective dialogue systems that are better equipped to handle the intricacies of grounded knowledge in conversations.

Enterprise Use Cases Combining Knowledge Graphs and Natural Language Processing

Knowledge management is a critical challenge for enterprises in today's digital world, as the volume and complexity of data being generated and collected continue to grow incessantly. Knowledge graphs (KG) emerged as a promising solution to this problem by providing a flexible, scalable, and semantically rich way to organize and make sense of data. This paper builds upon a recent survey of the research literature on combining KGs and Natural Language Processing (NLP). Based on selected application scenarios from enterprise context, we discuss synergies that result from such a combination. We cover various approaches from the three core areas of KG construction, reasoning as well as KG-based NLP tasks. In addition to explaining innovative enterprise use cases, we assess their maturity in terms of practical applicability and conclude with an outlook on emergent application areas for the future.

A Comparative Analysis of Conversational Large Language Models in Knowledge-Based Text Generation

Generating natural language text from graph-structured data is essential for conversational information seeking. Semantic triples derived from knowledge graphs can serve as a valuable source for grounding responses from conversational agents by providing a factual basis for the information they communicate. This is especially relevant in the context of large language models, which offer great potential for conversational interaction but are prone to hallucinating, omitting, or producing conflicting information. In this study, we conduct an empirical analysis of conversational large language models in generating natural language text from semantic triples. We compare four large language models of varying sizes with different prompting techniques. Through a series of benchmark experiments on the WebNLG dataset, we analyze the models' performance and identify the most common issues in the generated predictions. Our findings show that the capabilities of large language models in triple verbalization can be significantly improved through few-shot prompting, post-processing, and efficient fine-tuning techniques, particularly for smaller models that exhibit lower zero-shot performance.

Evaluating Large Language Models in Semantic Parsing for Conversational Question Answering over Knowledge Graphs

Conversational question answering systems often rely on semantic parsing to enable interactive information retrieval, which involves the generation of structured database queries from a natural language input. For information-seeking conversations about facts stored within a knowledge graph, dialogue utterances are transformed into graph queries in a process that is called knowledge-based conversational question answering. This paper evaluates the performance of large language models that have not been explicitly pre-trained on this task. Through a series of experiments on an extensive benchmark dataset, we compare models of varying sizes with different prompting techniques and identify common issue types in the generated output. Our results demonstrate that large language models are capable of generating graph queries from dialogues, with significant improvements achievable through few-shot prompting and fine-tuning techniques, especially for smaller models that exhibit lower zero-shot performance.

From Data to Dialogue: Leveraging the Structure of Knowledge Graphs for Conversational Exploratory Search

Exploratory search is an open-ended information retrieval process that aims at discovering knowledge about a topic or domain rather than searching for a specific answer or piece of information. Conversational interfaces are particularly suitable for supporting exploratory search, allowing users to refine queries and examine search results through interactive dialogues. In addition to conversational search interfaces, knowledge graphs are also useful in supporting information exploration due to their rich semantic representation of data items. In this study, we demonstrate the synergistic effects of combining knowledge graphs and conversational interfaces for exploratory search, bridging the gap between structured and unstructured information retrieval. To this end, we propose a knowledge-driven dialogue system for exploring news articles by asking natural language questions and using the graph structure to navigate between related topics. Based on a user study with 54 participants, we empirically evaluate the effectiveness of the graph-based exploratory search and discuss design implications for developing such systems.