CIR at iKAT SCAI 2026: Exploring Clarification Need Prediction in Agentic Conversational Search

This paper presents the participation of the Cologne Information Retrieval group in the iKAT SCAI 2026 shared task. We use an agentic conversational search system, equipped with tools for query rewriting, retrieval and reranking, answer generation, and clarification need prediction and clarification question generation. We experiment with two different neural clarification need prediction models.