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Engaging in discussions that involve diverse perspectives and exchanging arguments on a controversial issue is a natural way for humans to form opinions. In this process, the way arguments are presented plays a crucial role in determining…
Online Digital Assistants, such as Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, Apple Siri are very popular and provide a range or services to their users, a key function is their ability to satisfy user information needs from the sources available to…
Conversational recommender systems offer the promise of interactive, engaging ways for users to find items they enjoy. We seek to improve conversational recommendation via three dimensions: 1) We aim to mimic a common mode of human…
Search engines like Google, Yahoo or Bing are an excellent support for finding documents, but this strength also imposes a limitation. As they are optimized for document retrieval tasks, they perform less well when it comes to more complex…
Task-oriented dialog systems are often trained on human/human dialogs, such as collected from Wizard-of-Oz interfaces. However, human/human corpora are frequently too small for supervised training to be effective. This paper investigates…
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…
NLP-assisted solutions to support qualitative data analysis have gained considerable traction. However, no unified evaluation framework exists which can account for the many different settings in which qualitative researchers may employ…
Information access systems such as search engines and generative AI are central to how people seek, evaluate, and interpret information. Yet most systems are designed to optimise retrieval rather than to help users develop better search…
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…
Exploratory search is an open-ended information retrieval process that aims at discovering knowledge about a topic or domain rather than searching for a specific answer or piece of information. Conversational interfaces are particularly…
Software development is a complex endeavor that depends on a wide variety of contextual factors involving a large amount of distributed information. This knowledge could include: technology-related tasks, software operating environments and…
Conversational Swarm Intelligence (CSI) is an AI-powered communication and collaboration technology that allows large, networked groups (of potentially unlimited size) to hold thoughtful conversational deliberations in real-time. Inspired…
The goal of conversational product search (CPS) is to develop an intelligent, chat-based shopping assistant that can directly interact with customers to understand shopping intents, ask clarification questions, and find relevant products.…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have increasingly been utilized in social simulations, where they are often guided by carefully crafted instructions to stably exhibit human-like behaviors during simulations. Nevertheless, we doubt the…
Search engine researchers typically depict search as the solitary activity of an individual searcher. In contrast, results from our critical-incident survey of 150 users on Amazon's Mechanical Turk service suggest that social interactions…
We address the problem of designing a conversational avatar capable of a sequence of casual conversations with older adults. Users at risk of loneliness, social anxiety or a sense of ennui may benefit from practicing such conversations in…
Proactive dialogue systems, related to a wide range of real-world conversational applications, equip the conversational agent with the capability of leading the conversation direction towards achieving pre-defined targets or fulfilling…
For nearly two decades, conversational agents have played a critical role in structuring interactions in collaborative learning, shaping group dynamics, and supporting student engagement. The recent integration of large language models…
Voice-based systems like Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and Apple Siri, along with the growing popularity of OpenAI's ChatGPT and Microsoft's Copilot, serve diverse populations, including visually impaired and low-literacy communities.…
Conversational Swarm Intelligence (CSI) is a new method for enabling large human groups to hold real-time networked conversations using a technique modeled on the dynamics of biological swarms. Through the novel use of conversational agents…