Related papers: Beyond "How may I help you?": Assisting Customer S…
The rapid advancement of chat-based language models has led to remarkable progress in complex task-solving. However, their success heavily relies on human input to guide the conversation, which can be challenging and time-consuming. This…
Cybergrooming emerges as a growing threat to adolescent safety and mental health. One way to combat cybergrooming is to leverage predictive artificial intelligence (AI) to detect predatory behaviors in social media. However, these methods…
A long-term goal of reinforcement learning is to design agents that can autonomously interact and learn in the world. A critical challenge to such autonomy is the presence of irreversible states which require external assistance to recover…
We deal with the scenario of conversational search, where user queries are under-specified or ambiguous. This calls for a mixed-initiative setup. User-asks (queries) and system-answers, as well as system-asks (clarification questions) and…
Most AI systems today are designed to manage tasks and execute predefined steps. This makes them effective for process coordination but limited in their ability to engage in joint problem-solving with humans or contribute new ideas. We…
We propose a new task of conversational recommendation over multi-type dialogs, where the bots can proactively and naturally lead a conversation from a non-recommendation dialog (e.g., QA) to a recommendation dialog, taking into account…
We introduce a general-purpose, human-in-the-loop dual dialogue system to support mental health care professionals. The system, co-designed with care providers, is conceptualized to assist them in interacting with care seekers rather than…
This paper develops a new approach for estimating an interpretable, relational model of a black-box autonomous agent that can plan and act. Our main contributions are a new paradigm for estimating such models using a minimal query interface…
Customer experience plays a critical role for a profitable organisation or company. A satisfied customer for a company corresponds to higher rates of customer retention, and better representation in the market. One way to improve customer…
Online lifelong learning enables agents to accumulate experience across interactions and continually improve on long-horizon tasks. However, existing methods typically treat retrieval from past experience as a passive operation, triggering…
Many people use search engines to find online guidance to solve computer or mobile device problems. Users frequently encounter challenges in identifying effective solutions from search results, often wasting time trying ineffective…
Visual analytics (VA) is typically applied to complex data, thus requiring complex tools. While visual analytics empowers analysts in data analysis, analysts may get lost in the complexity occasionally. This highlights the need for…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in natural language tasks requiring complex reasoning, yet their application in agentic, multi-step reasoning within interactive environments remains a difficult challenge.…
Conversational recommender systems have attracted immense attention recently. The most recent approaches rely on neural models trained on recorded dialogs between humans, implementing an end-to-end learning process. These systems are…
This work compares user collaboration with conversational personal assistants vs. teams of expert chatbots. Two studies were performed to investigate whether each approach affects accomplishment of tasks and collaboration costs.…
Clarification resolution plays an important role in various information retrieval tasks such as interactive question answering and conversational search. In such context, the user often formulates their information needs as short and…
Recommendation algorithms have been pivotal in handling the overwhelming volume of online content. However, these algorithms seldom consider direct user input, resulting in superficial interaction between them. Efforts have been made to…
Humans engage in lifelong social interactions through interacting with different people under different scenarios for different social goals. This requires social intelligence to gather information through a long time span and use it to…
We introduce a dynamic benchmarking system for conversational agents that evaluates their performance through a single, simulated, and lengthy user$\leftrightarrow$agent interaction. The interaction is a conversation between the user and…
Conversational and question-based recommender systems have gained increasing attention in recent years, with users enabled to converse with the system and better control recommendations. Nevertheless, research in the field is still limited,…