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Robots operating in human spaces must be able to engage in natural language interaction with people, both understanding and executing instructions, and using conversation to resolve ambiguity and recover from mistakes. To study this, we…
Existing emotional support conversation (ESC) systems mainly rely on end-to-end response generation or coarse strategy supervision, offering limited interpretability and little support for systematic skill improvement. We propose…
Collaboration is a task-oriented, high-level human behavior. In most cases, conversation serves as the primary medium for information exchange and coordination, making conversational data a valuable resource for the automatic analysis of…
Despite the long history of studying instant messaging usage, we know very little about how today's people participate in group chat channels and interact with others inside a real-world organization. In this short paper, we aim to update…
Multi-agent systems (MAS) have recently emerged as promising socio-collaborative companions for emotional and cognitive support. However, these systems frequently suffer from persona collapse--where agents revert to generic, homogenized…
Current evaluations of agents remain centered around one-shot task completion, failing to account for the inherently iterative and collaborative nature of many real-world problems, where human goals are often underspecified and evolve. We…
Language agents that interact with the world on their own have great potential for automating digital tasks. While large language model (LLM) agents have made progress in understanding and executing tasks such as textual games and webpage…
Collaborative research often includes contributors with varied perspectives from diverse linguistic backgrounds. However, English as a Second Language (ESL) researchers often struggle to communicate during meetings in English and comprehend…
The 1st edition of the workshop on Mixed-Initiative ConveRsatiOnal Systems (MICROS@ECIR2021) aims at investigating and collecting novel ideas and contributions in the field of conversational systems. Oftentimes, the users fulfill their…
The growing demand for software developers and the increasing development complexity have emphasized the need for support in software engineering projects. This is especially relevant in light of advancements in artificial intelligence,…
As data-driven methods, artificial intelligence (AI), and automated workflows accelerate scientific tasks, we see the rate of discovery increasingly limited by human decision-making tasks such as setting objectives, generating hypotheses,…
Conversational agents participating in multi-party interactions face significant challenges in dialogue state tracking, since the identity of the speaker adds significant contextual meaning. It is common to utilise diarisation models to…
Information exploration tasks are inherently complex, ill-structured, and involve sequences of actions usually spread over many sessions. When exploring a dataset, users tend to experiment higher degrees of uncertainty, mostly raised by…
We present a novel approach for generating plausible verbal interactions between virtual human-like agents and user avatars in shared virtual environments. Sense-Plan-Ask, or SPA, extends prior work in propositional planning and natural…
Effective robotic systems for long-horizon human-robot collaboration must adapt to a wide range of human partners, whose physical behavior, willingness to assist, and understanding of the robot's capabilities may change over time. This…
Recently emerged intelligent assistants on smartphones and home electronics (e.g., Siri and Alexa) can be seen as novel hybrids of domain-specific task-oriented spoken dialogue systems and open-domain non-task-oriented ones. To realize such…
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…
Task-oriented conversational systems are essential for efficiently addressing diverse user needs, yet their development requires substantial amounts of high-quality conversational data that is challenging and costly to obtain. While large…
Conversational information seeking (CIS) is concerned with a sequence of interactions between one or more users and an information system. Interactions in CIS are primarily based on natural language dialogue, while they may include other…
Large language model (LLM)-based agents that reason, plan, and act through tools, memory, and structured interaction are emerging as a promising paradigm for automating complex workflows. Recent systems such as OpenClaw and Claude Code…