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Open-ended human learning and information-seeking are increasingly mediated by digital assistants. However, such systems often ignore the user's pre-existing knowledge. Assuming a correlation between engagement and user responses such as…
Conversational Task Assistants (CTAs) guide users in performing a multitude of activities, such as making recipes. However, ensuring that interactions remain engaging, interesting, and enjoyable for CTA users is not trivial, especially for…
Some robots can interact with humans using natural language, and identify service requests through human-robot dialog. However, few robots are able to improve their language capabilities from this experience. In this paper, we develop a…
Since its inception in 2016, the Alexa Prize program has enabled hundreds of university students to explore and compete to develop conversational agents through the SocialBot Grand Challenge. The goal of the challenge is to build agents…
Curiosity is an important factor that favors independent and individualized learning in children. Research suggests that it is also a competence that can be fostered by training specific metacognitive skills and information-searching…
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…
This article describes a novel approach to expand in run-time the knowledge base of an Artificial Conversational Agent. A technique for automatic knowledge extraction from the user's sentence and four methods to insert the new acquired…
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…
Conversational agents are consistently growing in popularity and many people interact with them every day. While many conversational agents act as personal assistants, they can have many different goals. Some are task-oriented, such as…
There has been an increased focus on creating conversational open-domain dialogue systems in the spoken dialogue community. Unlike traditional dialogue systems, these conversational systems cannot assume any specific information need or…
Building open domain conversational systems that allow users to have engaging conversations on topics of their choice is a challenging task. Alexa Prize was launched in 2016 to tackle the problem of achieving natural, sustained, coherent…
In order to bring artificial agents into our lives, we will need to go beyond supervised learning on closed datasets to having the ability to continuously expand knowledge. Inspired by a student learning in a classroom, we present an agent…
We consider the problem of designing an artificial agent capable of interacting with humans in collaborative dialogue to produce creative, engaging narratives. In this task, the goal is to establish universe details, and to collaborate on…
Psychological curiosity plays a significant role in human intelligence to enhance learning through exploration and information acquisition. In the Artificial Intelligence (AI) community, artificial curiosity provides a natural intrinsic…
Conversational agents are exploding in popularity. However, much work remains in the area of social conversation as well as free-form conversation over a broad range of domains and topics. To advance the state of the art in conversational…
Virtual assistants such as Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri, Google Home, and Microsoft's Cortana, are becoming ubiquitous in our daily lives and successfully help users in various daily tasks, such as making phone calls or playing music. Yet,…
Politeness is a core dimension of human communication, yet its role in human-AI information seeking remains underexplored. We investigate how user politeness behaviour shapes conversational outcomes in a cooking-assistance setting. First,…
This paper presents a dataset collected from natural dialogs which enables to test the ability of dialog systems to learn new facts from user utterances throughout the dialog. This interactive learning will help with one of the most…
Information-seeking AI assistant systems aim to answer users' queries about knowledge in a timely manner. However, both the human-perceived helpfulness of information-seeking assistant systems and its fairness implication are…
Data scientists are constantly creating methods to efficiently and accurately populate big data sets for use in large-scale applications. Many recent efforts utilize crowd-sourcing and textual interfaces. In this paper, we propose a new…