Abstract
In conversational query answering systems, context plays a significant role to accurately and meaningfully carry it forward. In many chatbots, such as in Expedia, the discussion quickly degenerates into circling back to restarting the conversation or to inviting a live agent to intervene because the bot could not grasp the context. Contexts shorten interactions by way of implied query constraints to narrow search and to not repeat them in subsequent queries. In this paper, we introduce a novel way of viewing contexts as a distance function via the concept of query relaxation. We demonstrate that a typed domain distance function is sufficient to model context in a conversation. Our approach is based on the idea of non-monotonic constraint inheritance in a context hierarchy.