Related papers: Examining the Potential for Conversational Explora…
Intelligent personal assistants (IPAs) are supposed to help us multitask. Yet the impact of IPA use on multitasking is not clearly quantified, particularly in situations where primary tasks are also language based. Using a dual task…
The rise of intelligent assistant systems like Siri and Alexa have led to the emergence of Conversational Search, a research track of Information Retrieval (IR) that involves interactive and iterative information-seeking user-system dialog.…
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…
Many people browse online communities to learn from others' experiences and opinions, e.g., for constructing travel plans. Conversational search powered by large language models (LLMs) could ease this information-seeking task, but it…
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…
Digital assistants have become ubiquitous in e-commerce applications, following the recent advancements in Information Retrieval (IR), Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI). However, customers are…
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…
Limited linguistic coverage for Intelligent Personal Assistants (IPAs) means that many interact in a non-native language. Yet we know little about how IPAs currently support or hinder these users. Through native (L1) and non-native (L2)…
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…
As voice-based Conversational Assistants (CAs), including Alexa, Siri, Google Home, have become commonly embedded in households, many children now routinely interact with Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems. It is important to research…
It has recently become feasible to run personal digital assistants on phones and other personal devices. In this paper we describe a design for a natural language understanding system that runs on device. In comparison to a server-based…
Web search engines have become the dominant tools for finding information on the Internet. Due to their popularity, users apply them to a wide range of search needs, from simple look-ups to rather complex information tasks. This paper…
In the realm of online privacy, privacy assistants play a pivotal role in empowering users to manage their privacy effectively. Although recent studies have shown promising progress in tackling tasks such as privacy violation detection and…
Smart speakers collect voice commands, which can be used to infer sensitive information about users. Given the potential for privacy harms, there is a need for greater transparency and control over the data collected, used, and shared by…
Much has been written about privacy in the context of conversational and voice assistants. Yet, there have been remarkably few developments in terms of the actual privacy offered by these devices. But how much of this is due to the…
The rise of large language models has opened new avenues for users seeking legal advice. However, users often lack professional legal knowledge, which can lead to questions that omit critical information. This deficiency makes it…
In recent years, online shopping has grown rapidly, especially during the COVID-19 period. However, it still lacks elements typical of physical stores, such as empathic support and personalised advice from a sales assistant. This study…
Conversational agents are exploding in popularity. However, much work remains in the area of non goal-oriented conversations, despite significant growth in research interest over recent years. To advance the state of the art in…
The motivation, concept, design and implementation of latent semantic search for search engines have limited semantic search, entity extraction and property attribution features, have insufficient accuracy and response time of latent…
We describe experiments towards building a conversational digital assistant that considers the preferred conversational style of the user. In particular, these experiments are designed to measure whether users prefer and trust an assistant…