Improving Ad-hoc Search Effectiveness for Conversational Information Retrieval via Model Merging
Conversational information retrieval is challenging since it requires the consideration of the conversation history which potentially gives rise to topic shifts and coreference resolution across previous turns. To address these challenges, previous work mainly rely on traditional fine-tuning of ad-hoc retrievers on conversational datasets or extrapolates their generalizability through multi-tasking. However, this mainstream approach is costly - since it requires model re-training - and exhibits catastrophic forgetting, where the model loses its foundational ad-hoc retrieval performance. In thi
