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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 agents have been gaining increasing popularity in recent years. Influenced by the widespread adoption of task-oriented agents such as Apple Siri and Amazon Alexa, these agents are being deployed into various applications to…
While standalone Voice Assistants (VAs) are promising to support older adults' daily routine and wellbeing management, onboarding and setting up these devices can be challenging. Although some older adults choose to seek assistance from…
Animated avatars, which look and talk like humans, are iconic visions of the future of AI-powered systems. Through many sci-fi movies we are acquainted with the idea of speaking to such virtual personalities as if they were humans. Today,…
In this paper, we identify challenges in children's current information retrieval process, and propose conversational robots as an opportunity to ease this process in a responsible way. Tools children currently use in this process, such as…
Robots in urban environments will inevitably encounter situations beyond their capabilities (e.g., delivery robots unable to press traffic light buttons), necessitating bystander assistance. These spontaneous collaborations possess…
Voice assistants (VAs) are becoming a feature of our everyday life. Yet, the user experience (UX) is often limited, leading to underuse, disengagement, and abandonment. Co-designing interactions for VAs with potential end-users can be…
Information exploration tasks are inherently complex, ill-structured, and involve sequences of actions usually spread over many sessions. When exploring a dataset, users tend to experiment higher degrees of uncertainty, mostly raised by…
Intelligent agents such as Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant are now built into streaming TV systems, allowing people to use voice input to navigate the increasingly complex set of apps available on a TV. However, these systems typically…
Modern conversational agents such as Alexa and Google Assistant represent significant progress in speech recognition, natural language processing, and speech synthesis. But as these agents have grown more realistic, concerns have been…
How can we design AI tools that effectively support human decision-making by complementing and enhancing users' reasoning processes? Common recommendation-centric approaches face challenges such as inappropriate reliance or a lack of…
Exploration is one of the core challenges in reinforcement learning. A common formulation of curiosity-driven exploration uses the difference between the real future and the future predicted by a learned model. However, predicting the…
The increasing integration of artificial intelligence (AI) in visual analytics (VA) tools raises vital questions about the behavior of users, their trust, and the potential of induced biases when provided with guidance during data…
Archives are an important source of study for various scholars. Digitization and the web have made archives more accessible and led to the development of several time-aware exploratory search systems. However these systems have been…
Many popular form factors of digital assistants---such as Amazon Echo, Apple Homepod, or Google Home---enable the user to hold a conversation with these systems based only on the speech modality. The lack of a screen presents unique…
Virtual assistants, also known as intelligent conversational systems such as Google's Virtual Assistant and Apple's Siri, interact with human-like responses to users' queries and finish specific tasks. Meanwhile, existing recommendation…
With the rise of voice assistants and an increase in mobile search usage, natural language has become an important query language. So far, most of the current systems are not able to process these queries because of the vagueness and…
Open-domain conversational search assistants aim at answering user questions about open topics in a conversational manner. In this paper we show how the Transformer architecture achieves state-of-the-art results in key IR tasks, leveraging…
We present a dialogue elicitation study to assess how users envision conversations with a perfect voice assistant (VA). In an online survey, N=205 participants were prompted with everyday scenarios, and wrote the lines of both user and VA…
Information access systems, such as search engines, recommender systems, and conversational assistants, have become integral to our daily lives as they help us satisfy our information needs. However, evaluating the effectiveness of these…