Related papers: What Makes a Good Conversation? Challenges in Desi…
Building a persona-based conversation agent is challenging owing to the lack of large amounts of speaker-specific conversation data for model training. This paper addresses the problem by proposing a multi-task learning approach to training…
Conversational AI agents are commonly applied within single-user, turn-taking scenarios. The interaction mechanics of these scenarios are trivial: when the user enters a message, the AI agent produces a response. However, the interaction…
Humans quite frequently interact with conversational agents. The rapid advancement in generative language modeling through neural networks has helped advance the creation of intelligent conversational agents. Researchers typically evaluate…
Task-oriented dialog systems have been applied in various tasks, such as automated personal assistants, customer service providers and tutors. These systems work well when users have clear and explicit intentions that are well-aligned to…
The dialogue experience with conversational agents can be greatly enhanced with multimodal and immersive interactions in virtual reality. In this work, we present an open-source architecture with the goal of simplifying the development of…
Social acceptability is an important consideration for HCI designers who develop technologies for social contexts. However, the current theoretical foundations of social acceptability research do not account for the complex interactions…
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…
As AI systems take on greater autonomy, a quiet anxiety has settled over the HCI community: human agency is eroding. Users no longer control execution, interfaces recede, and machines decide. We argue that this anxiety, while…
Conversational agents (CAs) embodied in speakers or chatbots are becoming very popular in some countries, and despite their adult-centred design, they have become part of children's lives, generating a need for children-centric trustworthy…
While end-to-end neural conversation models have led to promising advances in reducing hand-crafted features and errors induced by the traditional complex system architecture, they typically require an enormous amount of data due to the…
Intelligent systems have traditionally been designed as tools rather than collaborators, often lacking critical characteristics that collaboration partnerships require. Recent advances in large language model (LLM) agents open new…
Clinical dialogue represents a complex duality requiring both the empathetic fluency of natural conversation and the rigorous precision of evidence-based medicine. While Large Language Models possess unprecedented linguistic capabilities,…
Chatbots are one class of intelligent, conversational software agents activated by natural language input (which can be in the form of text, voice, or both). They provide conversational output in response, and if commanded, can sometimes…
Effective verbal communication is crucial in human-robot collaboration. When a robot helps its human partner to complete a task with verbal instructions, referring expressions are commonly employed during the interaction. Despite many…
Large language models (LLMs) are excellent at maintaining high-level, convincing dialogue, but it remains unclear whether their persuasive success reflects genuine understanding of the discourse. We examine this question through informal…
Recent discussions at the intersection of journalism, HCI, and human-centered computing ask how technologies can help create reader-oriented news experiences. The current paper takes up this initiative by focusing on immigrant readers, a…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable promise in communicating with humans. Their potential use as artificial partners with humans in sociological experiments involving conversation is an exciting prospect. But how viable is…
From the earliest years of our lives, humans use language to express our beliefs and desires. Being able to talk to artificial agents about our preferences would thus fulfill a central goal of value alignment. Yet today, we lack…
The traditional process of building interactive machine learning systems can be viewed as a teacher-learner interaction scenario where the machine-learners are trained by one or more human-teachers. In this work, we explore the idea of…
Modern language models, while sophisticated, exhibit some inherent shortcomings, particularly in conversational settings. We claim that many of the observed shortcomings can be attributed to violation of one or more conversational…