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Conversational information seeking (CIS) has been recognized as a major emerging research area in information retrieval. Such research will require data and tools, to allow the implementation and study of conversational systems. This paper…
Real-time conversational deliberation is a critical groupwise method for reaching decisions, solving problems, evaluating priorities, generating ideas, and producing insights. Unfortunately, real-time conversations are difficult to scale,…
The development of conversational agents (CAs) has shown strong potential in supporting mental health through dialogue. While many studies focus on CAs for individual psychological care, research on agents designed for couples facing…
A discourse strategy is a strategy for communicating with another agent. Designing effective dialogue systems requires designing agents that can choose among discourse strategies. We claim that the design of effective strategies must take…
Large language models (LLMs) offer strong capabilities but raise cost and privacy concerns, whereas small language models (SLMs) facilitate efficient and private local inference yet suffer from limited capacity. To synergize the…
Generative AI (GenAI) tools are transforming information seeking, but their fluent, authoritative responses risk overreliance and discourage independent verification and reasoning. Rather than replacing the cognitive work of users, GenAI…
The collaborative design process is intrinsically complicated and dynamic, and researchers have long been exploring how to enhance efficiency in this process. As Artificial Intelligence technology evolves, it has been widely used as a…
With the emergence of conversational artificial intelligence (AI) agents, it is important to understand the mechanisms that influence users' experiences of these agents. We study a common tool in the designer's toolkit: conceptual…
Conversational systems typically focus on functional tasks such as scheduling appointments or creating todo lists. Instead we design and evaluate SlugBot (SB), one of 8 semifinalists in the 2018 AlexaPrize, whose goal is to support casual…
Conversational information seeking has evolved rapidly in the last few years with the development of Large Language Models (LLMs), providing the basis for interpreting and responding in a naturalistic manner to user requests. The extended…
In order to evaluate the contribution of Embodied (Animated) Conversational Agents (ECAs) to the effectiveness and usability of human-computer interaction, we developed a software platform meant to collect usage data. This platform, which…
Single-agent large language model (LLM) systems struggle to simultaneously support diverse conversational functions and maintain safety in behavioral health communication. We propose a safety-aware, role-orchestrated multi-agent LLM…
Large language models are increasingly deployed in multi-agent systems to overcome context limitations by distributing information across agents. Yet whether agents can reliably compute with distributed information, rather than merely…
Conversational agents or chatbots are widely investigated and used across different fields including healthcare, education, and marketing. Still, the development of chatbots for assisting secure coding practices is in its infancy. In this…
In task-oriented dialogues with symbiotic robots, the robot usually takes the initiative in dialogue progression and topic selection. In such robot-driven dialogue, the user's sense of participation in the dialogue is reduced because the…
Software development is a cognitively intensive process requiring multitasking, adherence to evolving workflows, and continuous learning. With the rise of large language model (LLM)-based tools, such as conversational agents (CAs), there is…
A dialogue is successful when there is alignment between the speakers at different linguistic levels. In this work, we consider the dialogue occurring between interlocutors engaged in a collaborative learning task, where they are not only…
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…
The greatest challenges in building sophisticated open-domain conversational agents arise directly from the potential for ongoing mixed-initiative multi-turn dialogues, which do not follow a particular plan or pursue a particular fixed…
Large language models (LLMs) increasingly power mental-health chatbots, yet the field still lacks a scalable, theory-grounded way to decide which model is most effective to deploy. We present ESC-Judge, the first end-to-end evaluation…