1. A method of disambiguating user intent in conversational interactions for information retrieval, the method comprising: providing access to a set of content items, each of the content items being associated with metadata that describes the corresponding content items; providing access to structural knowledge, the structural knowledge showing semantic relationships and links among the content items; providing a user preference signature, the user preference signature describing preferences of a user for at least one of (i) particular content items and (ii) metadata associated with the content items; receiving a first input from the user, the first input intended by the user to identify at least one desired content item; determining an ambiguity index of the first input; upon a condition in which the ambiguity index exceeds a first threshold value, determining a query input based on the first input and at least one of the structural knowledge, the user preference signature, a location of the user, and a time of the first input and selecting a subset of content items from the set of content items based on comparing the query input and the metadata associated with the subset of content items; and upon a condition in which the ambiguity index does not exceed the first threshold value, selecting a subset of content items from the set of content items based on comparing the first input and the metadata associated with the subset of content items.