Conversational RAG — Multi-Turn Q&A With Context Carry-Forward

I will build a conversational RAG system supporting multi-turn dialogue — implementing query rewriting that incorporates conversation history before retrieval, conversation history management within the context window budget, follow-up question handling that correctly resolves references to previous turns, and a chat interface maintaining coherent dialogue across many exchanges. Single-turn RAG fails on follow-up questions — "What is the policy?" followed by "Who approved it?" cannot be answered correctly without understanding that "it" refers to the policy from the previous turn; conversational RAG with query rewriting resolves these references before retrieval, producing correct answers across multi-turn dialogues.

The build covers query rewriting using conversation history, history-conditioned retrieval, context window budget management for history plus retrieved content, follow-up reference resolution, and multi-turn conversation testing across realistic dialogue sequences.