Related papers: Examining the Potential for Conversational Explora…
The popularity of voice-controlled smart speakers with intelligent personal assistants (IPAs) like the Amazon Echo and their increasing use as an interface for other Internet of Things (IoT) technologies in the home provides opportunities…
Conversational systems have made significant progress in generating natural language responses. However, their potential as conversational search systems is currently limited due to their passive role in the information-seeking process. One…
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…
Automatic speech recognition (ASR) meets more informal and free-form input data as voice user interfaces and conversational agents such as the voice assistants such as Alexa, Google Home, etc., gain popularity. Conversational speech is both…
Exploratory search aims to guide users through a corpus rather than pinpointing exact information. We propose an exploratory search system based on hierarchical clusters and document summaries using sentence embeddings. With sentence…
The experience and adoption of conversational search is tied to the accuracy and completeness of users' mental models -- their internal frameworks for understanding and predicting system behaviour. Thus, understanding these models can…
In conversational search systems, a key component is to determine and clarify the intent behind complex queries. We view intent clarification in light of the exploratory search paradigm, where users, through an iterative, evolving process…
Determining how voice assistants should broker consent to share data with third party software has proven to be a complex problem. Devices often require users to switch to companion smartphone apps in order to navigate permissions menus for…
Intelligent Personal Assistants (IPAs) have become widely popular in recent times. Most of the commercial IPAs today support a wide range of skills including Alarms, Reminders, Weather Updates, Music, News, Factual Questioning-Answering,…
Voice Personal Assistants (VPA) have become a common household appliance. As one of the leading platforms for VPA technology, Amazon created Alexa and designed Amazon Kids for children to safely enjoy the rich functionalities of VPA and for…
Following the success of spoken dialogue systems (SDS) in smartphone assistants and smart speakers, a number of communicative robots are developed and commercialized. Compared with the conventional SDSs designed as a human-machine…
The desire and ability to seek new information strategically are fundamental to human learning but often overlooked in current language agent evaluation. We analyze a popular web shopping task designed to test language agents' ability to…
In conversational search, agents can interact with users by asking clarifying questions to increase their chance to find better results. Many recent works and shared tasks in both NLP and IR communities have focused on identifying the need…
Despite the growth of e-commerce, brick-and-mortar stores are still the preferred destinations for many people. In this paper, we present ISA, a mobile-based intelligent shopping assistant that is designed to improve shopping experience in…
Searching for and making decisions about information is becoming increasingly difficult as the amount of information and number of choices increases. Recommendation systems help users find items of interest of a particular type, such as…
Conversational AI systems are increasingly being used in place of traditional search engines to help users complete information-seeking tasks. This has raised concerns in the political domain, where biased or hallucinated outputs could…
Intelligent assistants change the way people interact with computers and make it possible for people to search for products through conversations when they have purchase needs. During the interactions, the system could ask questions on…
Dialogue technologies such as Amazon's Alexa have the potential to transform the healthcare industry. However, current systems are not yet naturally interactive: they are often turn-based, have naive end-of-turn detection and completely…
The role of conversational assistants has become more prevalent in helping people increase their productivity. Document-centered assistance, for example to help an individual quickly review a document, has seen less significant progress,…
This paper describes the Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts, the only Internet-accessible collection of digital documents allowing the user to 1) dynamically create customized, typographically readable documents on demand, 2) search the…