[2608.02556] Beyond the Final Prompt: Measuring the Effect of Within-Conversation Context on AI Answers

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Computer Science > Information Retrieval

arXiv:2608.02556 (cs)

[Submitted on 3 Aug 2026]

Title:Beyond the Final Prompt: Measuring the Effect of Within-Conversation Context on AI Answers

Authors:Benjamin Tannenbaum<br>View a PDF of the paper titled Beyond the Final Prompt: Measuring the Effect of Within-Conversation Context on AI Answers, by Benjamin Tannenbaum

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Abstract:An isolated final user message is often treated as the query in evaluations of AI systems. In a conversation, however, the actionable request may be distributed across preceding turns. We directly test whether that omitted within-conversation context changes answers. For each of 180 English multi-turn conversations sampled from a governed commercial corpus and the public PRISM dataset, we hold the final user message and requested answer model constant while generating three answers: one from the full role-labelled conversation, one from the final message alone, and one from the final message plus a prefix-only reconstruction capped at 160 words. A separately requested judge model evaluates answers under randomized labels. The prespecified primary endpoint is a material difference that could change what the user does, rather than a difference in style or detail. After inverse-probability weighting to the eligible cohorts, the full-conversation and isolated-final answers differ materially in 44.7% of cases (95% bootstrap CI 33.8% to 56.1%). Full-conversation answers score 0.49 points higher on a 0 to 4 request-satisfaction scale (0.32 to 0.67). Adding the compressed prefix reduces the material-difference rate to 30.8% (20.2% to 42.1%), a 13.9-point reduction (4.9% to 24.1%), and reduces the mean satisfaction gap to 0.01 points (-0.12 to 0.13). Yet compression is not equivalent to the complete dialogue context: almost one third of answers remain materially different. An order-swapped repeat on 48 cases yields 91.7% agreement and kappa = 0.83 for the primary decision. The study concerns preceding turns in the same conversation and does not test persistent memory across separate conversations.

Comments:<br>8 pages, 3 figures, 2 tables. Companion to arXiv:2607.22392

Subjects:

Information Retrieval (cs.IR)

Cite as:<br>arXiv:2608.02556 [cs.IR]

(or<br>arXiv:2608.02556v1 [cs.IR] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.02556

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arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

Submission history<br>From: Benjamin Tannenbaum [view email]<br>[v1]<br>Mon, 3 Aug 2026 17:40:46 UTC (14 KB)

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View a PDF of the paper titled Beyond the Final Prompt: Measuring the Effect of Within-Conversation Context on AI Answers, by Benjamin Tannenbaum<br>View PDF<br>HTML (experimental)<br>TeX Source

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