Papers › A Comparison of Question Rewriting Methods for Conversational Passage Retrieval

A Comparison of Question Rewriting Methods for Conversational Passage Retrieval

19 Jan 2021arXiv:2101.07382archive 2025-07-28

Svitlana Vakulenko, Nikos Voskarides, Zhucheng Tu, Shayne Longpre

Conversational passage retrieval relies on question rewriting to modify the original question so that it no longer depends on the conversation history. Several methods for question rewriting have recently been proposed, but they were compared under different retrieval pipelines. We bridge this gap by thoroughly evaluating those question rewriting methods on the TREC CAsT 2019 and 2020 datasets under the same retrieval pipeline. We analyze the effect of different types of question rewriting methods on retrieval performance and show that by combining question rewriting methods of different types we can achieve state-of-the-art performance on both datasets.

PaperPDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

svakulenk0/cast_evaluation officialmentioned in paper report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Passage RetrievalQuestion RewritingRetrieval

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections