Related papers: ProCIS: A Benchmark for Proactive Retrieval in Con…
Conversational search is a relatively young area of research that aims at automating an information-seeking dialogue. In this paper we help to position it with respect to other research areas within conversational Artificial Intelligence…
Conversation is the natural mode for information exchange in daily life, a spoken conversational interaction for search input and output is a logical format for information seeking. However, the conceptualisation of user-system interactions…
Information-Seeking Dialogue (ISD) agents aim to provide accurate responses to user queries. While proficient in directly addressing user queries, these agents, as well as LLMs in general, predominantly exhibit reactive behavior, lacking…
There has been growing interest in using neural networks and deep learning techniques to create dialogue systems. Conversational recommendation is an interesting setting for the scientific exploration of dialogue with natural language as…
Conversational interfaces that allow for intuitive and comprehensive access to digitally stored information remain an ambitious goal. In this thesis, we lay foundations for designing conversational search systems by analyzing the…
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…
In an information-seeking conversation, a user may ask questions that are under-specified or unanswerable. An ideal agent would interact by initiating different response types according to the available knowledge sources. However, most…
Conversational search has evolved as a new information retrieval paradigm, marking a shift from traditional search systems towards interactive dialogues with intelligent search agents. This change especially affects exploratory…
Conversational Product Search ( CPS ) systems interact with users via natural language to offer personalized and context-aware product lists. However, most existing research on CPS is limited to simulated conversations, due to the lack of a…
As a cornerstone of modern information access, search engines have become indispensable in everyday life. With the rapid advancements in AI and natural language processing (NLP) technologies, particularly large language models (LLMs),…
Existing conversational datasets consist either of written proxies for dialog or small-scale transcriptions of natural speech. We introduce 'Interview': a large-scale (105K conversations) media dialog dataset collected from news interview…
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…
A proactive dialogue system has the ability to proactively lead the conversation. Different from the general chatbots which only react to the user, proactive dialogue systems can be used to achieve some goals, e.g., to recommend some items…
Progress in Machine Learning is often driven by the availability of large datasets, and consistent evaluation metrics for comparing modeling approaches. To this end, we present a repository of conversational datasets consisting of hundreds…
Customer service chatbots are increasingly expected to serve not merely as reactive support tools for users, but as strategic interfaces for harvesting high-value information and business intelligence. In response, we make three main…
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…
Though great progress has been made for human-machine conversation, current dialogue system is still in its infancy: it usually converses passively and utters words more as a matter of response, rather than on its own initiatives. In this…
Conversational search systems enable information retrieval via natural language interactions, with the goal of maximizing users' information gain over multiple dialogue turns. The increasing prevalence of conversational interfaces adopting…
Conversational search is an approach to information retrieval (IR), where users engage in a dialogue with an agent in order to satisfy their information needs. Previous conceptual work described properties and actions a good agent should…
Hot news is one of the most popular topics in daily conversations. However, news grounded conversation has long been stymied by the lack of well-designed task definition and scarce data. In this paper, we propose a novel task, Proactive…