Query Enhanced Knowledge-Intensive Conversation via Unsupervised Joint Modeling

The quality of knowledge retrieval is crucial in knowledge-intensive conversations. Two common strategies to improve the retrieval quality are finetuning the retriever or generating a self-contained query, while they encounter heavy burdens on expensive computation and elaborate annotations. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised query enhanced approach for knowledge-intensive conversations, namely QKConv. There are three modules in QKConv: a query generator, an off-the-shelf knowledge selector, and a response generator. Without extra supervision, the end-to-end joint training of QKConv explores multiple candidate queries and utilizes corresponding selected knowledge to yield the target response. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method, we conducted comprehensive experiments on conversational question-answering, task-oriented dialogue, and knowledge-grounded conversation. Experimental results demonstrate that QKConv achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to unsupervised methods and competitive performance compared to supervised methods.