Related papers: Proactive User Information Acquisition via Chats o…
Mixed-initiative dialogue tasks involve repeated exchanges of information and conversational control. Conversational agents gain control by generating responses that follow particular dialogue intents or strategies, prescribed by a policy…
Recognizing customer intent accurately with language models based on customer-agent conversational data is essential in today's digital customer service marketplace, but it is often hindered by the lack of sufficient labeled data. In this…
Prior work on personalized recommendations has focused on exploiting explicit signals from user-specific queries, clicks, likes, and ratings. This paper investigates tapping into a different source of implicit signals of interests and…
The next step for intelligent dialog agents is to escape their role as silent bystanders and become proactive. Well-defined proactive behavior may improve human-machine cooperation, as the agent takes a more active role during interaction…
It is difficult to train a personalized task-oriented dialogue system because the data collected from each individual is often insufficient. Personalized dialogue systems trained on a small dataset can overfit and make it difficult to adapt…
Target-oriented proactive dialogue systems aim to lead conversations from a dialogue context toward a pre-determined target, such as making recommendations on designated items or introducing new specific topics. To this end, it is critical…
The zero-shot chain of thought (CoT) approach is often used in question answering (QA) by language models (LMs) for tasks that require multiple reasoning steps. However, some QA tasks hinge more on accessing relevant knowledge than on…
Large language model (LLM)-based agents have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in addressing complex tasks, thereby enabling more advanced information retrieval and supporting deeper, more sophisticated human information-seeking…
We present a chatbot implementing a novel dialogue management approach based on logical inference. Instead of framing conversation a sequence of response generation tasks, we model conversation as a collaborative inference process in which…
Smart assistants increasingly act proactively, yet mistimed or intrusive behavior often causes users to lose trust and disable these features. Learning user preferences for proactive assistance is difficult because real-world studies are…
The concept of a Human-AI team has gained increasing attention in recent years. For effective collaboration between humans and AI teammates, proactivity is crucial for close coordination and effective communication. However, the design of…
Goal-Oriented (GO) Dialogue Systems, colloquially known as goal oriented chatbots, help users achieve a predefined goal (e.g. book a movie ticket) within a closed domain. A first step is to understand the user's goal by using natural…
Clarification resolution plays an important role in various information retrieval tasks such as interactive question answering and conversational search. In such context, the user often formulates their information needs as short and…
Existing task-oriented conversational search systems heavily rely on domain ontologies with pre-defined slots and candidate value sets. In practical applications, these prerequisites are hard to meet, due to the emerging new user…
We present a methodology to systematically test conversational recommender systems with regards to conversational breakdowns. It involves examining conversations generated between the system and simulated users for a set of pre-defined…
Language models (LMs) can be directed to perform target tasks by using labeled examples or natural language prompts. But selecting examples or writing prompts for can be challenging--especially in tasks that involve unusual edge cases,…
Predicting user satisfaction in conversational systems has become critical, as spoken conversational assistants operate in increasingly complex domains. Online satisfaction prediction (i.e., predicting satisfaction of the user with the…
Robot-moderated group discussions have the potential to facilitate engaging and productive interactions among human participants. Previous work on topic management in conversational agents has predominantly focused on human engagement and…
Dialogue systems are usually categorized into two types, open-domain and task-oriented. The first one focuses on chatting with users and making them engage in the conversations, where selecting a proper topic to fit the dialogue context is…
One of the long-standing aspirations in conversational AI is to allow them to autonomously take initiatives in conversations, i.e., being proactive. This is especially challenging for multi-party conversations. Prior NLP research focused…