  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.
