{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/macaw-an-extensible-conversational","title":"Macaw: An Extensible Conversational Information Seeking Platform","arxiv_id":"1912.08904","date":"2019-12-18","proceeding":null,"authors":["Hamed Zamani","Nick Craswell"],"abstract":"Conversational information seeking (CIS) has been recognized as a major emerging research area in information retrieval. Such research will require data and tools, to allow the implementation and study of conversational systems. This paper introduces Macaw, an open-source framework with a modular architecture for CIS research. Macaw supports multi-turn, multi-modal, and mixed-initiative interactions, and enables research for tasks such as document retrieval, question answering, recommendation, and structured data exploration. It has a modular design to encourage the study of new CIS algorithms, which can be evaluated in batch mode. It can also integrate with a user interface, which allows user studies and data collection in an interactive mode, where the back end can be fully algorithmic or a wizard of oz setup. Macaw is distributed under the MIT License.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.08904v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.08904v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"macaw-an-extensible-conversational","repo_url":"https://github.com/microsoft/macaw","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"information-retrieval","task_name":"Information Retrieval"},{"task_slug":"question-answering","task_name":"Question Answering"},{"task_slug":"retrieval","task_name":"Retrieval"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"wizard","method_name":"Wizard"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}