Non-limiting examples of the present disclosure describe a convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture configured to evaluate conversational relevance of query-response pairs. A CNN model is provided that can include a first branch, a second branch, and multilayer perceptron (MLP) layers. The first branch includes convolutional layers with dynamic pooling to process a query. The second branch includes convolutional layers with dynamic pooling to process candidate responses for the query. The query and the candidate responses are processed in parallel using the CNN model. The MLP layers are configured to rank query-response pairs based on conversational relevance.