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Understanding and characterizing how people interact in information-seeking conversations is crucial in developing conversational search systems. In this paper, we introduce a new dataset designed for this purpose and use it to analyze…
The conversational search task aims to enable a user to resolve information needs via natural language dialogue with an agent. In this paper, we aim to develop a conceptual framework of the actions and intents of users and agents explaining…
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…
Conversational search has evolved as a new information retrieval paradigm, marking a shift from traditional search systems towards interactive dialogues with intelligent search agents. This change especially affects exploratory…
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…
Conversational search is a relatively young area of research that aims at automating an information-seeking dialogue. In this paper we help to position it with respect to other research areas within conversational Artificial Intelligence…
The field of conversational information seeking, which is rapidly gaining interest in both academia and industry, is changing how we interact with search engines through natural language interactions. Existing datasets and methods are…
Data users need relevant context and research expertise to effectively search for and identify relevant datasets. Leading data providers, such as the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), offer standardized…
Conversation is the natural mode for information exchange in daily life, a spoken conversational interaction for search input and output is a logical format for information seeking. However, the conceptualisation of user-system interactions…
In this paper, we investigate the task of general conversational image retrieval on open-domain images. The objective is to search for images based on interactive conversations between humans and computers. To advance this task, we curate a…
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…
Conversational search presents opportunities to support users in their search activities to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of search while reducing their cognitive load. Limitations of the potential competency of conversational…
The largest store of continually updating knowledge on our planet can be accessed via internet search. In this work we study giving access to this information to conversational agents. Large language models, even though they store an…
Recommender systems are software applications that help users find items of interest in situations of information overload in a personalized way, using knowledge about the needs and preferences of individual users. In conversational…
Conversational interfaces are likely to become more efficient, intuitive and engaging way for human-computer interaction than today's text or touch-based interfaces. Current research efforts concerning conversational interfaces focus…
Sharing ideas through communication with peers is the primary mode of human interaction. Consequently, extensive research has been conducted in the area of conversational AI, leading to an increase in the availability and diversity of…
A frequent pattern in customer care conversations is the agents responding with appropriate webpage URLs that address users' needs. We study the task of predicting the documents that customer care agents can use to facilitate users' needs.…
Context: User intent modeling is a crucial process in Natural Language Processing that aims to identify the underlying purpose behind a user's request, enabling personalized responses. With a vast array of approaches introduced in the…
A conversational information retrieval (CIR) system is an information retrieval (IR) system with a conversational interface which allows users to interact with the system to seek information via multi-turn conversations of natural language,…
The ability to engage in mixed-initiative interaction is one of the core requirements for a conversational search system. How to achieve this is poorly understood. We propose a set of unsupervised metrics, termed ConversationShape, that…