Related papers: Inferring Informational Goals from Free-Text Queri…
The Lumiere Project centers on harnessing probability and utility to provide assistance to computer software users. We review work on Bayesian user models that can be employed to infer a users needs by considering a user's background,…
The conversational search task aims to enable a user to resolve information needs via natural language dialogue with an agent. In this paper, we aim to develop a conceptual framework of the actions and intents of users and agents explaining…
The availability of an abundance of knowledge sources has spurred a large amount of effort in the development and enhancement of Information Retrieval techniques. Users information needs are expressed in natural language and successful…
Conversational assistants are being progressively adopted by the general population. However, they are not capable of handling complicated information-seeking tasks that involve multiple turns of information exchange. Due to the limited…
User intent understanding is a crucial step in designing both conversational agents and search engines. Detecting or inferring user intent is challenging, since the user utterances or queries can be short, ambiguous, and contextually…
How can we enable users to heavily specify criteria for database queries in a user-friendly way? This paper describes a general framework of a conversational bot that extracts meaningful information from user's sentences, that asks…
Whereas today's information systems are well-equipped for efficient query handling, their strict mathematical foundations hamper their use for everyday tasks. In daily life, people expect information to be offered in a personalized and…
Conversational search presents opportunities to support users in their search activities to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of search while reducing their cognitive load. Limitations of the potential competency of conversational…
Analyzing interaction data provides an opportunity to learn about users, uncover their underlying goals, and create intelligent visualization systems. The first step for intelligent response in visualizations is to enable computers to infer…
Conversational search is based on a user-system cooperation with the objective to solve an information-seeking task. In this report, we discuss the implication of such cooperation with the learning perspective from both user and system…
The task of generating a database query from a question in natural language suffers from ambiguity and insufficiently precise description of the goal. The problem is amplified when the system needs to generalize to databases unseen at…
Conversational search systems enable information retrieval via natural language interactions, with the goal of maximizing users' information gain over multiple dialogue turns. The increasing prevalence of conversational interfaces adopting…
Consumers on a shopping mission often leverage both product search and information seeking systems, such as web search engines and Question Answering (QA) systems, in an iterative process to improve their understanding of available products…
Information Retrieval (IR) is concerned with the identification of documents in a collection that are relevant to a given information need, usually represented as a query containing terms or keywords, which are supposed to be a good…
Textual queries are largely employed in information retrieval to let users specify search goals in a natural way. However, differences in user and system terminologies can challenge the identification of the user's information needs, and…
Users issue queries to Search Engines, and try to find the desired information in the results produced. They repeat this process if their information need is not met at the first place. It is crucial to identify the important words in a…
One of the core challenges in Visual Dialogue problems is asking the question that will provide the most useful information towards achieving the required objective. Encouraging an agent to ask the right questions is difficult because we…
Conversational interfaces that allow for intuitive and comprehensive access to digitally stored information remain an ambitious goal. In this thesis, we lay foundations for designing conversational search systems by analyzing the…
We provide an introductory review of Bayesian data analytical methods, with a focus on applications for linguistics, psychology, psycholinguistics, and cognitive science. The empirically oriented researcher will benefit from making Bayesian…
Is it possible to make statistical inference broadly accessible to non-statisticians without sacrificing mathematical rigor or inference quality? This paper describes BayesDB, a probabilistic programming platform that aims to enable users…