PCQPR: Proactive Conversational Question Planning with Reflection

Abstract

Conversational Question Generation (CQG) enhances the interactivity of conversational question-answering systems in fields such as education, customer service, and entertainment. However, traditional CQG, focusing primarily on the immediate context, lacks the conversational foresight necessary to guide conversations toward specified conclusions. This limitation significantly restricts their ability to achieve conclusion-oriented conversational outcomes. In this work, we redefine the CQG task as Conclusion-driven Conversational Question Generation (CCQG) by focusing on proactivity, not merely reacting to the unfolding conversation but actively steering it towards a conclusion-oriented question-answer pair. To address this, we propose a novel approach, called Proactive Conversational Question Planning with self-Refining (PCQPR). Concretely, by integrating a planning algorithm inspired by Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) with the analytical capabilities of large language models (LLMs), PCQPR predicts future conversation turns and continuously refines its questioning strategies. This iterative self-refining mechanism ensures the generation of contextually relevant questions strategically devised to reach a specified outcome. Our extensive evaluations demonstrate that PCQPR significantly surpasses existing CQG methods, marking a paradigm shift towards conclusion-oriented conversational question-answering systems.