Conversational question answering is a subfield of natural language processing in which an automated system answers questions within an interactive, multi-turn dialogue. Unlike traditional single-turn question answering systems that treat each query independently, a conversational question answering system maintains dialogue history to resolve contextual dependencies, such as pronouns and elliptical references, across successive exchanges. This allows the system to follow the flow of a discussion, perform multi-step reasoning, and retrieve or compute relevant information from source data to address interconnected user inquiries.