Related papers: Evaluating Older Users' Experiences with Commercia…

Voice-based technologies are typically developed for the average user, and thus generally not tailored to the specific needs of any subgroup of the population, like seniors. This paper presents CMU GetGoing, an accessible trip planning…

Virtual reality (VR) is increasingly used as a platform for social interaction, including as a means for older adults to maintain engagement. However, there has been limited research to examine the features of social VR that are most…

The use of Large Language Models for dialogue systems is rising, presenting a new challenge: how do we assess users' chat experience in these systems? Leveraging Natural Language Processing (NLP)-powered dialog analyzers to create dialog…

We present some results concerning the dialogue behavior and inferred sentiment of a group of older adults interacting with a computer-based avatar. Our avatar is unique in its ability to hold natural dialogues on a wide range of everyday…

A personalized conversational sales agent could have much commercial potential. E-commerce companies such as Amazon, eBay, JD, Alibaba etc. are piloting such kind of agents with their users. However, the research on this topic is very…

Task-oriented conversational systems are essential for efficiently addressing diverse user needs, yet their development requires substantial amounts of high-quality conversational data that is challenging and costly to obtain. While large…

From the earliest experiments in the 20th century to the utilization of large language models and transformers, dialogue systems research has continued to evolve, playing crucial roles in numerous fields. This paper offers a comprehensive…

Seniors represent a growing user base for mobile applications; however, many apps fail to adequately address their accessibility challenges and usability preferences. To investigate this issue, we conducted an exploratory focus group study…

There has been vast literature that studies Conversational Agents (CAs) in facilitating older adults' health. The vast and diverse studies warrants a comprehensive review that concludes the main findings and proposes research directions for…

Pervasive personal communication technologies offer the potential for important social benefits for individual users, but also the potential for significant social difficulties and costs. In research on face-to-face social interaction,…

Dialogue systems, commonly known as chatbots, have gained escalating popularity in recent times due to their wide-spread applications in carrying out chit-chat conversations with users and task-oriented dialogues to accomplish various user…

We present a methodology to systematically test conversational recommender systems with regards to conversational breakdowns. It involves examining conversations generated between the system and simulated users for a set of pre-defined…

The distinct abilities of older adults to interact with computers has motivated a wide range of contributions in the the form of design guidelines for making technologies usable and accessible for the elderly population. However, despite…

There is a resurgent interest in developing intelligent open-domain dialog systems due to the availability of large amounts of conversational data and the recent progress on neural approaches to conversational AI. Unlike traditional…

Enhancing user engagement through interactions plays an essential role in socially-driven dialogues. While prior works have optimized models to reason over relevant knowledge or plan a dialogue act flow, the relationship between user…

Recommender systems exploit interaction history to estimate user preference, having been heavily used in a wide range of industry applications. However, static recommendation models are difficult to answer two important questions well due…

Dialog is a natural modality for interaction between customers and businesses in the service industry. As customers call up the service provider, their interactions may be routine or extraordinary. We believe that these interactions, when…

How should conversational agents respond to verbal abuse through the user? To answer this question, we conduct a large-scale crowd-sourced evaluation of abuse response strategies employed by current state-of-the-art systems. Our results…

User ratings play a significant role in spoken dialogue systems. Typically, such ratings tend to be averaged across all users and then utilized as feedback to improve the system or personalize its behavior. While this method can be useful…

We have developed a conversational recommendation system designed to help users navigate through a set of limited options to find the best choice. Unlike many internet scale systems that use a singular set of search terms and return a…