Subscribe
Follow Us
Publication

Studying the effectiveness of conversational search refinement through user simulation

By Alexandre Salle, Shervin Malmasi, Oleg Rokhlenko, Eugene Agichtein
2021
Download Copy BibTeX
Share
Download
Copy BibTeX
Share
A key application of conversational search is refining a user’s search intent by asking a series of clarification questions, aiming to improve the relevance of search results. Training and evaluating such conversational systems currently requires human participation, making it unfeasible to examine a wide range of user behaviors. To support robust training/evaluation of such systems, we propose a simulation framework called COSEARCHER4 that includes a parameterized user simulator controlling key behavioral factors like cooperativeness and patience. Using a standard conversational query clarification benchmark, we experiment with a range of user behaviors, semantic policies, and dynamic facet generation. Our results quantify the effects of user behaviors, and identify critical conditions required for conversational search refinement to be effective.
Research areas

Latest news

Work with us

See more jobs See more jobs
Data Scientist I, Workforce Intelligence PXT-Talent
US, VA, Arlington
Amazon’s mission is to be the most customer centric company in the world. The Workforce Staffing (WFS) organization is on the front line of that mission by hiring the hourly fulfillment associates who make that mission a reality. To drive the necessary growth and continued scale of Amazon’s associate needs within a constrained employment environment, Amazon has created the Workforce Intelligence (WFI) team. This team will (re)invent how Amazon attracts, communicates with, and ultimately hires its hourly associates. This team owns multi-layered research and program implementation to drive deep learning, process improvements, and strategic recommendations to global leadership. Are you passionate about data? Do you enjoy questioning the status quo? Do complex and difficult challenges excite you? If yes, this may be the team for you. The Data Scientist will be responsible for creating cutting edge algorithms, predictive and prescriptive models as well as required data models to facilitate WFS at-scale warehouse associate hiring. This role acts as an internal consultant to the marketing, biz ops and candidate experience teams covering responsibilities such as at-scale hiring process improvement, analyzing large scale candidate/associate data and being strategic to providing best candidate hiring experience to WFS warehouse associate candidates. We are open to hiring candidates to work out of one of the following locations: Arlington, VA, USA
Applied Scientist, Amazon
US, CA, Sunnyvale
At Amazon Fashion, we are obsessed with making Amazon Fashion the most loved fashion destinations globally. We're searching for Computer Vision pioneers who are passionate about technology, innovation, and customer experience, and who are enthusiastic about making a lasting impact on the industry. You'll be working with talented scientists, engineers, and product managers to innovate on behalf of our customers. If you're fired up about being part of a dynamic, driven team, then this is your moment to join us on this exciting journey and change the world of eCommerce forever Key job responsibilities As a Applied Scientist, you will be at the forefront to define, own and drive the science that span multiple machine learning models and enabling multiple product/engineering teams and organizations. You will partner with product management and technical leadership to identify opportunities to innovate customer facing experiences. You will identify new areas of investment and work to align product roadmaps to deliver on these opportunities. As a science leader, you will not only develop unique scientific solutions, but more importantly influence strategy and outcomes across different Amazon organizations such as Search, Personalization and more. This role is inherently cross-functional and requires a strong ability to communicate, influence and earn the trust of software engineers, technical and business leadership. We are open to hiring candidates to work out of one of the following locations: Sunnyvale, CA, USA
Data Scientist, Amazon Fashion
US, CA, Sunnyvale
Are you passionate about solving unique customer-facing problems in the Amazon scale? Are you excited about utilizing statistical analysis, machine learning, data mining and leverage tons of Amazon data to learn and infer customer shopping patterns? Do you enjoy working with a diversity of engineers, machine learning scientists, product managers and user-experience designers? If so, you have found the right match! Fashion is extremely fast-moving, visual, subjective, and it presents numerous unique problem domains such as product recommendations, product discovery and evaluation. The vision for Amazon Fashion is to make Amazon the number one online shopping destination for Fashion customers by providing large selections, inspiring and accurate recommendations and customer experience. The mission of Fit science team as part of Fashion Tech is to innovate and develop scalable ML solutions to provide personalized fit and size recommendation when Amazon Fashion customers evaluate apparels or shoes online. The team is hiring a Data Scientist who has a solid background in Statistical Analysis, Machine Learning and Data Mining and a proven record of effectively analyzing large complex heterogeneous datasets, and is motivated to grow professionally as a Data Scientist. Key job responsibilities - You will work on our Science team and partner closely with applied scientists, data engineers as well as product managers, UX designers, and business partners to answer complex problems via data analysis. Outputs from your analysis will directly help improve the performance of the ML based recommendation systems thereby enhancing the customer experience as well as inform the roadmap for science and the product. - You can effectively analyze complex and disparate datasets collected from diverse sources to derive key insights. - You have excellent communication skills to be able to work with cross-functional team members to understand key questions and earn the trust of senior leaders. - You are able to multi-task between different tasks such as gap analysis of algorithm results, integrating multiple disparate datasets, doing business intelligence, analyzing engagement metrics or presenting to stakeholders. - You thrive in an agile and fast-paced environment on highly visible projects and initiatives. We are open to hiring candidates to work out of one of the following locations: Sunnyvale, CA, USA
Applied Scientist, Amazon Fashion
US, CA, Sunnyvale
Are you passionate about solving unique customer-facing problem in the Amazon scale? Are you excited by developing and productizing machine learning, deep learning algorithms and leverage tons of Amazon data to learn and infer customer shopping patterns? Do you enjoy working with a diversity of engineers, machine learning scientists, product managers and user-experience designers? If so, you have found the right match! Fashion is extremely fast-moving, visual, subjective, and it presents numerous unique problem domains such as product recommendations, product discovery and evaluation. The vision for Amazon Fashion is to make Amazon the number one online shopping destination for Fashion customers by providing large selections, inspiring and accurate recommendations and customer experience. The mission of Fit science team as part of Fashion Tech is to innovate and develop scalable ML solutions to provide personalized fit and size recommendation when Amazon Fashion customers evaluate apparels or shoes online. The team is hiring Applied Scientist who has a solid background in applied Machine Learning and a proven record of solving customer-facing problems via scalable ML solutions, and is motivated to grow professionally as an ML scientist. Key job responsibilities - Tackle ambiguous problems in Machine Learning and drive full life-cycle Machine Learning projects. - Build machine learning models, perform proof-of-concept, experiment, optimize, and deploy your models into production. - Run A/B experiments, gather data, and perform statistical tests. - Establish scalable, efficient, automated processes for large-scale data mining, machine-learning model development, model validation and serving. - Work closely with software engineers and product managers to assist in productizing your ML models. We are open to hiring candidates to work out of one of the following locations: Sunnyvale, CA, USA
Research Scientist II – Fulfillment Optimization, Network Planning and Fulfillment Execution Science
US, WA, Bellevue
Have you ever wondered how Amazon predicts when your order will arrive and how we ensure that it actually arrives on at the promised date/time? Have you wondered where all those Amazon semi-trucks on the road are headed? Are you passionate about increasing efficiency and reducing carbon footprint? Does the idea of having worldwide impact on Amazon's logistics network including our planes, trucks, and vans sound exciting to you? If so, then we want to talk with you! The Network Planning and Fulfillment Execution team owns and operates OR/ML and simulation systems that continually optimize the distribution of tens of millions of products across Amazon’s warehouses in the most cost-effective manner, utilizing large scale optimization techniques and distributed computing in trying to reduce overall transportation costs while improving the customer experience. We are focused on saving hundreds of millions of dollars using big data technologies, cutting edge science, machine learning, and scalable distributed software on the cloud that automates and optimizes inventory and shipments to customers under the uncertainty of demand, pricing and supply. We’re looking for a passionate, results-oriented, and inventive Research Scientist who can create and improve OR/ML models for our outbound transportation planning systems. In addition, you will be working on design, development and evaluation of highly innovative OR and ML models for solving complex business problems in the area of outbound transportation planning systems. More specifically, you will be developing a Mathematical Optimization model towards short term Origin-Destination flows that are inventory aware and adhere to facility capacities given destination demand. This will also require you to build machine learning models to predict inventory N weeks out (N<13 Weeks) and ML models to calibrate inventory bounds and math model errors. You will work closely with our product managers and software engineers to disambiguate complex supply chain problems and create ML solutions to solve those problems at scale. You will directly impact our direct customers, and even play with big data and incredible scale in the background. Watch http://bit.ly/amazon-scot to get the big picture. Key job responsibilities As part of your daily work you will: * Design, development and evaluation of highly innovative OR/ML models for solving complex business problems. * Analyze and extract relevant information from large amounts of data to help automate and optimize key processes. * Research and apply the latest ML techniques and best practices from both academia and industry. * Think about customers and how to improve the customer delivery experience. * Use and analytical techniques to create scalable solutions for business problems. * Work closely with data & software engineering teams to build model implementations and integrate successful models and algorithms in production systems at very large scale. * Technically lead and mentor other scientists in team. * Establish scalable, efficient, automated processes for large scale data analyses, model development, model validation and model implementation. A day in the life This is a great role for someone who likes to learn new things. You will have the opportunity to learn all about how Amazon plans for and executes within it's logistics network including Fulfillment Centers, Sort Centers, Delivery Stations, and more. In this role, you will be a design and develop Optimization and Machine Learning models with significant scope, impact, and high visibility. Your solutions will impact business segments worth many-billions-of-dollars and geographies spanning multiple countries and markets. From day one, you will be working with bar raising scientists, engineers, and designers. You will also collaborate with the broader science community in Amazon to broaden the horizon of your work. Successful candidates must thrive in fast-paced environments, which encourage collaborative and creative problem solving, be able to measure and estimate risks, constructively critique peer research, and align research focuses with the Amazon's strategic needs. We look for individuals who know how to deliver results and show a desire to develop themselves, their colleagues, and their career. About the team Network Planning and Fulfillment Execution Science team contains a group of scientists with different technical backgrounds including Machine Learning and Operations Research, who will collaborate closely with you on your projects. Our team directly supports multiple functional areas across Fulfillment Optimization and the research needs of the corresponding product and engineering teams. We tackle some of the most mathematically complex challenges in facility and transportation planning to improve Amazon's operational efficiency worldwide and at a scale that is unique to Amazon. We often seek the opportunity of applying hybrid techniques in the space of Operations Research and Machine Learning to tackle some of our biggest technical challenges. We disambiguate complex supply chain problems and create ML and optimization solutions to solve those problems at scale. We are open to hiring candidates to work out of one of the following locations: Bellevue, WA, USA
Senior Data Scientist, PubTech Data, Insights & Analytics
US, WA, Seattle
Amazon is continuing to invest in its Advertising business to tap into the growing online advertising market. The Publisher Technologies team builds and operates extensible services that empower 1P Publishers to improve the monetization of their customer experiences, along with the experiences themselves. We bias toward standards-based and flexible designs that allow Publishers the ability to invent on top of our solutions and to interoperate well with other advertising technology providers; both internal and external. The Publisher Technology Data, Insights, and Analytics team enables faster data-driven decision making for Publishers and Monetization teams by providing them with near real time data, data management tools, actionable insights, and an easy-to-use reporting experience. Our data products provide Publishers and Monetization teams with the capabilities necessary to better understand the performance of their Advertising products along with supporting machine learning at scale. In this role, you will join a team whose data products and services empower hundreds of teams across Amazon with near real time data to support big data analytics, insights, and machine learning at scale. You will collaborate with cross-functional teams to design, develop, and implement advanced data tools, predictive models, and machine learning algorithms to support Advertising strategies and optimize revenue streams. You will analyze large-scale data to identify patterns and trends, and design and run A/B experiments to improve Publisher and advertiser experiences. Key job responsibilities - Design and lead large projects and experiments from beginning to end, and drive solutions to complex or ambiguous problems - Create tools and solve challenges using statistical modeling, machine learning, optimization, and/or other approaches for quantifiable impact on the business - Use broad expertise to recommend the right strategies, methodologies, and best practices, teaching and mentoring others - Key influencer of your team’s business strategy and of related teams’ strategies - Communication and documentation of methodologies, insights, and recommendations for senior leaders with various levels of technical knowledge We are open to hiring candidates to work out of one of the following locations: Seattle, WA, USA
Intern - Economics, PXT Central Science
US, WA, Seattle
The Amazon Economics Team is hiring Economist Interns. We are looking for detail-oriented, organized, and responsible individuals who are eager to learn how to work with large and complicated data sets to solve real-world business problems. Some knowledge of econometrics, as well as basic familiarity with Stata, R, or Python is necessary. Experience with SQL, UNIX, Sawtooth, and Spark would be a plus. These are full-time positions at 40 hours per week, with compensation being awarded on an hourly basis. You will learn how to build data sets and perform applied econometric analysis at Internet speed collaborating with economists, data scientists and MBAʼs. These skills will translate well into writing applied chapters in your dissertation and provide you with work experience that may help you with future job market placement. Roughly 85% of interns from previous cohorts have converted to full-time economics employment at Amazon. If you are interested, please send your CV to our mailing list at econ-internship@amazon.com. We are open to hiring candidates to work out of one of the following locations: Seattle, WA, USA
Applied Scientist, Special Projects
US, WA, Seattle
Innovators wanted! Are you an entrepreneur? A builder? A dreamer? This role is part of an Amazon Special Projects team that takes the company’s Think Big leadership principle to the extreme. We focus on creating entirely new products and services with a goal of positively impacting the lives of our customers. No industries or subject areas are out of bounds. If you’re interested in innovating at scale to address big challenges in the world, this is the team for you. Here at Amazon, we embrace our differences. We are committed to furthering our culture of inclusion. We have thirteen employee-led affinity groups, reaching 40,000 employees in over 190 chapters globally. We are constantly learning through programs that are local, regional, and global. Amazon’s culture of inclusion is reinforced within our 16 Leadership Principles, which remind team members to seek diverse perspectives, learn and be curious, and earn trust. Our team highly values work-life balance, mentorship and career growth. We believe striking the right balance between your personal and professional life is critical to life-long happiness and fulfillment. We care about your career growth and strive to assign projects and offer training that will challenge you to become your best. We are a team of doers working passionately to apply cutting-edge advances in technology to solve real-world problems. As an Applied Scientist, you will work with a unique and gifted team developing exciting products for consumers and collaborate with cross-functional teams. Our team rewards intellectual curiosity while maintaining a laser-focus in bringing entirely new products to Amazon. Competitive candidates are responsive, flexible, and able to succeed within an open, collaborative, entrepreneurial, startup-like environment. At the cutting edge of both academic and applied research in this product area, you have the opportunity to work together with some of the most talented scientists, engineers, and product managers. Key job responsibilities We are looking for a computational focused candidate with experience predicting, folding, and designing proteins. The candidate can expect to work on a small team working collaboratively with software developers, engineers, and like-minded scientists on a fast paced project. We are open to hiring candidates to work out of one of the following locations: Seattle, WA, USA
Senior Applied Scientist, Sponsored Products
US, NY, New York
Amazon is investing heavily in building a world-class advertising business, and we are responsible for defining and delivering a collection of self-service performance advertising products that drive discovery and sales. We deliver billions of ad impressions and millions of clicks daily and break fresh ground to create world-class products. We are highly motivated, collaborative, and fun-loving with an entrepreneurial spirit and bias for action. With a broad mandate to experiment and innovate, we are growing at an unprecedented rate with a seemingly endless range of new opportunities. Our systems and algorithms operate on one of the world's largest product catalogs, matching shoppers with advertised products with a high relevance bar and strict latency constraints. Sponsored Products Detail Page Blended Widgets team is chartered with building novel product recommendation experiences. We push the innovation frontiers for our hundreds of millions of customers WW to aid product discovery while helping shoppers to find relevant products easily. Our team is building differentiated recommendations that highlight specific characteristics of products (either direct attributes, inferred or machine learned), and leveraging generative AI to provide interactive shopping experiences. We are looking for a Senior Applied Scientist who can delight our customers by continually learning and inventing. Our ideal candidate is an experienced Applied Scientist who has a track-record of performing deep analysis and is passionate about applying advanced ML and statistical techniques to solve real-world, ambiguous and complex challenges to optimize and improve the product performance, and who is motivated to achieve results in a fast-paced environment. The position offers an exceptional opportunity to grow your technical and non-technical skills and make a real difference to the Amazon Advertising business. As a Senior Applied Scientist on this team, you will: * Be the technical leader in Machine Learning; lead efforts within this team and collaborate across teams * Rapidly design, prototype and test many possible hypotheses in a high-ambiguity environment, perform hands-on analysis and modeling of enormous data sets to develop insights that improve shopper experiences and merchandise sales * Drive end-to-end Machine Learning projects that have a high degree of ambiguity, scale, complexity. * Build machine learning models, perform proof-of-concept, experiment, optimize, and deploy your models into production; work closely with software engineers to assist in productionizing your ML models. * Establish scalable, efficient, automated processes for large-scale data analysis, machine-learning model development, model validation and serving. * Research new and innovative machine learning approaches. * Promote the culture of experimentation and applied science at Amazon Team video https://youtu.be/zD_6Lzw8raE We are also open to consider the candidate in Seattle, or Palo Alto. We are open to hiring candidates to work out of one of the following locations: New York, NY, USA
Senior Applied Scientist, Amazon
US, VA, Arlington
Amazon Advertising is one of Amazon's fastest growing and most profitable businesses, responsible for defining and delivering a collection of advertising products that drive discovery and sales. As a core product offering within our advertising portfolio, Sponsored Products (SP) helps merchants, retail vendors, and brand owners succeed via native advertising, which grows incremental sales of their products sold through Amazon. The SP team's primary goals are to help shoppers discover new products they love, be the most efficient way for advertisers to meet their business objectives, and build a sustainable business that continuously innovates on behalf of customers. Our products and solutions are strategically important to enable our Retail and Marketplace businesses to drive long-term growth. We deliver billions of ad impressions and millions of clicks and break fresh ground in product and technical innovations every day! The Search Sourcing and Relevance team parses billions of ads to surface the best ad to show to Amazon shoppers. The team strives to understand customer intent and identify relevant ads that enable them to discover new and alternate products. This also enables sellers on Amazon to showcase their products to customers, which may, at times, be buried deeper in the search results. By showing the right ads to customers at the right time, this team improves the shopper experience, increase advertiser ROI, and improves long-term monetization. This is a talented team of machine learning scientists and software engineers working on complex solutions to understand the customer intent and present them with ads that are not only relevant to their actual shopping experience but also non-obtrusive. This area is of strategic importance to Amazon Retail and Marketplace business, driving long term growth. Key job responsibilities As a Senior Applied Scientist on this team, you will: - Be the technical leader in Machine Learning; lead efforts within this team and across other teams. - Perform hands-on analysis and modeling of enormous data sets to develop insights that increase traffic monetization and merchandise sales, without compromising the shopper experience. - Drive end-to-end Machine Learning projects that have a high degree of ambiguity, scale, complexity. - Build machine learning models, perform proof-of-concept, experiment, optimize, and deploy your models into production; work closely with software engineers to assist in productionizing your ML models. - Run A/B experiments, gather data, and perform statistical analysis. - Establish scalable, efficient, automated processes for large-scale data analysis, machine-learning model development, model validation and serving. - Research new and innovative machine learning approaches. - Recruit Applied Scientists to the team and provide mentorship. About the team Amazon is investing heavily in building a world-class advertising business. This team defines and delivers a collection of advertising products that drive discovery and sales. Our solutions generate billions in revenue and drive long-term growth for Amazon’s Retail and Marketplace businesses. We deliver billions of ad impressions, millions of clicks daily, and break fresh ground to create world-class products. We are a highly motivated, collaborative, and fun-loving team with an entrepreneurial spirit - with a broad mandate to experiment and innovate. You will invent new experiences and influence customer-facing shopping experiences to help suppliers grow their retail business and the auction dynamics that leverage native advertising; this is your opportunity to work within the fastest-growing businesses across all of Amazon! Define a long-term science vision for our advertising business, driven from our customers' needs, translating that direction into specific plans for research and applied scientists, as well as engineering and product teams. This role combines science leadership, organizational ability, technical strength, product focus, and business understanding. We are open to hiring candidates to work out of one of the following locations: Arlington, VA, USA
View from space of a connected network around planet Earth representing the Internet of Things.
Get more from Amazon Science
Sign up for our newsletter
Subscribe
Amazon.com | Conditions of Use | Privacy | © 1996-2023 Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates
Follow Us