Related papers: Answer Interaction in Non-factoid Question Answeri…
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…
Question answering systems are recognized as popular and frequently effective means of information seeking on the web. In such systems, information seekers can receive a concise response to their query by presenting their questions in…
A good dialogue agent should have the ability to interact with users by both responding to questions and by asking questions, and importantly to learn from both types of interaction. In this work, we explore this direction by designing a…
Despite end-to-end neural systems making significant progress in the last decade for task-oriented as well as chit-chat based dialogue systems, most dialogue systems rely on hybrid approaches which use a combination of rule-based, retrieval…
Even the best information retrieval model cannot always identify the most useful answers to a user query. This is in particular the case with web search systems, where it is known that users tend to minimise their effort to access relevant…
At its core, information access and seeking is an interactive process. In existing search engines, interactions are limited to a few pre-defined actions, such as "requery", "click on a document", "scrolling up/down", "going to the next…
With the rise in mobile and voice search, answer passage retrieval acts as a critical component of an effective information retrieval system for open domain question answering. Currently, there are no comparable collections that address…
Considering the widespread use of mobile and voice search, answer passage retrieval for non-factoid questions plays a critical role in modern information retrieval systems. Despite the importance of the task, the community still feels the…
Open-domain dialog systems (also known as chatbots) have increasingly drawn attention in natural language processing. Some of the recent work aims at incorporating affect information into sequence-to-sequence neural dialog modeling, making…
Ranking tasks are usually based on the text of the main body of the page and the actions (clicks) of users on the page. There are other elements that could be leveraged to better contextualise the ranking experience (e.g. text in other…
Modern online platforms rely on effective rating systems to learn about items. We consider the optimal design of rating systems that collect binary feedback after transactions. We make three contributions. First, we formalize the…
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…
Intelligent assistants change the way people interact with computers and make it possible for people to search for products through conversations when they have purchase needs. During the interactions, the system could ask questions on…
In an information-seeking conversation, a user may ask questions that are under-specified or unanswerable. An ideal agent would interact by initiating different response types according to the available knowledge sources. However, most…
Intelligent personal assistant systems with either text-based or voice-based conversational interfaces are becoming increasingly popular around the world. Retrieval-based conversation models have the advantages of returning fluent and…
Images and text in advertisements interact in complex, non-literal ways. The two channels are usually complementary, with each channel telling a different part of the story. Current approaches, such as image captioning methods, only examine…
User-machine interaction is important for spoken content retrieval. For text content retrieval, the user can easily scan through and select on a list of retrieved item. This is impossible for spoken content retrieval, because the retrieved…
Multimodal chatbots have become one of the major topics for dialogue systems in both research community and industry. Recently, researchers have shed light on the multimodality of responses as well as dialogue contexts. This work explores…
Intelligent personal assistant systems that are able to have multi-turn conversations with human users are becoming increasingly popular. Most previous research has been focused on using either retrieval-based or generation-based methods to…
Search engine researchers typically depict search as the solitary activity of an individual searcher. In contrast, results from our critical-incident survey of 150 users on Amazon's Mechanical Turk service suggest that social interactions…