Related papers: Exploring Current User Web Search Behaviours in An…
Conversational agents are becoming increasingly popular for supporting and facilitating learning. Conventional pedagogical agents are designed to play the role of human teachers by giving instructions to the students. In this paper, we…
The increasing reliance on digital information necessitates advancements in conversational search systems, particularly in terms of information transparency. While prior research in conversational information-seeking has concentrated on…
This article presents the Cogni-CISMeF project, which aims at improving the health information search engine CISMeF, by including a conversational agent that interacts with the user in natural language. To study the cognitive processes…
Vast improvements in natural language understanding and speech recognition have paved the way for conversational interaction with computers. While conversational agents have often been used for short goal-oriented dialog, we know little…
Conversational search enables multi-turn interactions between users and systems to fulfill users' complex information needs. During this interaction, the system should understand the users' search intent within the conversational context…
Information seeking conversations between users and Conversational Search Agents (CSAs) consist of multiple turns of interaction. While users initiate a search session, ideally a CSA should sometimes take the lead in the conversation by…
Traditional search methods primarily depend on string matches, while semantic search targets concept-based matches by recognizing underlying intents and contextual meanings of search terms. Semantic search is particularly beneficial for…
User intent understanding is a crucial step in designing both conversational agents and search engines. Detecting or inferring user intent is challenging, since the user utterances or queries can be short, ambiguous, and contextually…
Conversational search has seen increased recent attention in both the IR and NLP communities. It seeks to clarify and solve users' search needs through multi-turn natural language interactions. However, most existing systems are trained and…
Conversational recommender systems aim to interactively support online users in their information search and decision-making processes in an intuitive way. With the latest advances in voice-controlled devices, natural language processing,…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have become a popular interface for human-AI interaction, supporting information seeking and task assistance through natural, multi-turn dialogue. To respond to users within multi-turn dialogues, the…
Many businesses and consumers are extending the capabilities of voice-based services such as Amazon Alexa, Google Home, Microsoft Cortana, and Apple Siri to create custom voice experiences (also known as skills). As the number of these…
The search task and the system both affect the demand on cognitive resources during information search. In some situations, the demands may become too high for a person. This article has a three-fold goal. First, it presents and critiques…
We deal with the scenario of conversational search, where user queries are under-specified or ambiguous. This calls for a mixed-initiative setup. User-asks (queries) and system-answers, as well as system-asks (clarification questions) and…
As many of us in the information retrieval (IR) research community know and appreciate, search is far from being a solved problem. Millions of people struggle with tasks on search engines every day. Often, their struggles relate to the…
Conversational AI models are becoming increasingly popular and are about to replace traditional search engines for information retrieval and product discovery. This raises concerns about monetization strategies and the potential for subtle…
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…
Web search is among the most ubiquitous online activities, commonly used to acquire new knowledge and to satisfy learning-related objectives through informational search sessions. The importance of learning as an outcome of web search has…
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…
Conversational search systems can improve user experience in digital libraries by facilitating a natural and intuitive way to interact with library content. However, most conversational search systems are limited to performing simple tasks…