Related papers: Ericson: An Interactive Open-Domain Conversational…
How can we better understand the mechanisms behind multi-turn information seeking dialogues? How can we use these insights to design a dialogue system that does not require explicit query formulation upfront as in question answering? To…
Information seeking conversations between users and Conversational Search Agents (CSAs) consist of multiple turns of interaction. While users initiate a search session, ideally a CSA should sometimes take the lead in the conversation by…
Conversational information seeking (CIS) is playing an increasingly important role in connecting people to information. Due to the lack of suitable resource, previous studies on CIS are limited to the study of theoretical/conceptual…
A personalized conversational sales agent could have much commercial potential. E-commerce companies such as Amazon, eBay, JD, Alibaba etc. are piloting such kind of agents with their users. However, the research on this topic is very…
ECHO (Evaluation of Chat, Human behavior, and Outcomes) is an open research platform designed to support reproducible, mixed-method studies of human interaction with both conversational AI systems and Web search engines. It enables…
Conversational search applications offer the prospect of improved user experience in information seeking via agent support. However, it is not clear how searchers will respond to this mode of engagement, in comparison to a conventional…
Conversational assistants process personal data and must comply with data protection regulations that require providers to be transparent with users about how their data is handled. Transparency, in a legal sense, demands preciseness,…
Recent advances in vision-language learning have achieved notable success on complete-information question-answering datasets through the integration of extensive world knowledge. Yet, most models operate passively, responding to questions…
Recommender systems are software applications that help users find items of interest in situations of information overload in a personalized way, using knowledge about the needs and preferences of individual users. In conversational…
The increasing reliance on digital information necessitates advancements in conversational search systems, particularly in terms of information transparency. While prior research in conversational information-seeking has concentrated on…
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…
As AI agents become increasingly capable of complex knowledge tasks, the lack of context limits their capability to proactively reason about a user's latent needs throughout a long evolving project. In scientific research, many researchers…
There has recently been an explosion of work on spoken dialogue systems, along with an increased interest in open-domain systems that engage in casual conversations on popular topics such as movies, books and music. These systems aim to…
Successful conversational search systems can present natural, adaptive and interactive shopping experience for online shopping customers. However, building such systems from scratch faces real word challenges from both imperfect product…
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 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…
Active listening is a well-known skill applied in human communication to build intimacy and elicit self-disclosure to support a wide variety of cooperative tasks. When applied to conversational UIs, active listening from machines can also…
We present TacoBot, a task-oriented dialogue system built for the inaugural Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge, which assists users in completing multi-step cooking and home improvement tasks. TacoBot is designed with a user-centered principle…
In this work we discuss the related challenges and describe an approach towards the fusion of state-of-the-art technologies from the Spoken Dialogue Systems (SDS) and the Semantic Web and Information Retrieval domains. We envision a…
Many open-domain dialogue systems rely on multiple response generators, any of which can contribute a response to the dialogue in a particular context. Thus the ability to compare potential responses and then select the best plays an…