Related papers: Back to the Future for Dialogue Research: A Positi…
A proactive dialogue system has the ability to proactively lead the conversation. Different from the general chatbots which only react to the user, proactive dialogue systems can be used to achieve some goals, e.g., to recommend some items…
The development of chatbots requires collecting a large number of human-chatbot dialogues to reflect the breadth of users' sociodemographic backgrounds and conversational goals. However, the resource requirements to conduct the respective…
A natural way to resolve different points of view and form opinions is through exchanging arguments and knowledge. Facing the vast amount of available information on the internet, people tend to focus on information consistent with their…
How can we better understand the mechanisms behind multi-turn information seeking dialogues? How can we use these insights to design a dialogue system that does not require explicit query formulation upfront as in question answering? To…
We synthesize the reported results and recommendations of recent workshops and seminars that convened to discuss open questions within the important intersection of robotics, human-robot interaction, and spoken dialogue systems research.…
Recent advancements in conversational systems have significantly enhanced human-machine interactions across various domains. However, training these systems is challenging due to the scarcity of specialized dialogue data. Traditionally,…
In this dissertation I would like to guide the reader to the research on dialogue but more precisely the research I have conducted during my career since my PhD thesis. Starting from modular architectures with machine learning/deep learning…
In this paper we survey the methods and concepts developed for the evaluation of dialogue systems. Evaluation is a crucial part during the development process. Often, dialogue systems are evaluated by means of human evaluations and…
The lack of time-efficient and reliable evaluation methods hamper the development of conversational dialogue systems (chatbots). Evaluations requiring humans to converse with chatbots are time and cost-intensive, put high cognitive demands…
An important aspect of developing conversational agents is to give a bot the ability to improve through communicating with humans and to learn from the mistakes that it makes. Most research has focused on learning from fixed training sets…
Beyond mere formality, small talk plays a pivotal role in social dynamics, serving as a verbal handshake for building rapport and understanding. For conversational AI and social robots, the ability to engage in small talk enhances their…
The development and deployment of chatbot technology, while spanning decades and employing different techniques, require innovative frameworks to understand and interrogate their functionality and implications. A mere technocentric account…
This work investigates the task-oriented dialogue problem in mixed-domain settings. We study the effect of alternating between different domains in sequences of dialogue turns using two related state-of-the-art dialogue systems. We first…
Most existing dialogue corpora and models have been designed to fit into 2 predominant categories : task-oriented dialogues portray functional goals, such as making a restaurant reservation or booking a plane ticket, while…
Chatbots are intelligent conversational computer systems designed to mimic human conversation to enable automated online guidance and support. The increased benefits of chatbots led to their wide adoption by many industries in order to…
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…
Chatbots can serve as a viable tool for preliminary depression diagnosis via interactive conversations with potential patients. Nevertheless, the blend of task-oriented and chit-chat in diagnosis-related dialogues necessitates professional…
Chatbots' role in fostering self-reflection is now widely recognized, especially in inducing users' behavior change. While the benefits of 24/7 availability, scalability, and consistent responses have been demonstrated in contexts such as…
This study investigates the design, development, and evaluation of a Large Language Model (LLM)-based chatbot for teaching English conversations in an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) context. Employing the Design and Development…
This is a report on the NSF Future Directions Workshop on Automatic Evaluation of Dialog. The workshop explored the current state of the art along with its limitations and suggested promising directions for future work in this important and…