相关论文: Examining the Potential for Conversational Explora…

Digital Assistants (DAs) can support workers in the workplace and beyond. However, target user needs are not fully understood, and the functions that workers would ideally want a DA to support require further study. A richer understanding…

To solve difficult tasks, humans ask questions to acquire knowledge from external sources. In contrast, classical reinforcement learning agents lack such an ability and often resort to exploratory behavior. This is exacerbated as few…

This study examines textual, user-written search queries within the context of sound search engines, encompassing various applications such as foley, sound effects, and general audio retrieval. Current research inadequately addresses…

Complex search tasks - such as those from the Search as Learning (SAL) domain - often result in users developing an information need composed of several aspects. However, current models of searcher behaviour assume that individuals have an…

With the increasing popularity of social means to satisfy information needs using Social Media (e.g., Social Media Question Asking, SMQA) or Social Information Retrieval approaches, this paper tries to identify types of information needs…

This study examines conversational business analytics, an approach that utilizes AI to address the technical competency gaps that hinder end users from effectively using traditional self-service analytics. By facilitating natural language…

Traditional goal-oriented dialogue systems rely on various components such as natural language understanding, dialogue state tracking, policy learning and response generation. Training each component requires annotations which are hard to…

In this paper we describe a web search agent, called Global Search Agent (hereafter GSA for short). GSA integrates and enhances several search techniques in order to achieve significant improvements in the user-perceived quality of…

Users of database-centric Web applications, especially in the e-commerce domain, often resort to exploratory ``trial-and-error'' queries since the underlying data space is huge and unfamiliar, and there are several alternatives for search…

Open-domain conversational search assistants aim at answering user questions about open topics in a conversational manner. In this paper we show how the Transformer architecture achieves state-of-the-art results in key IR tasks, leveraging…

With the rise of voice assistants and an increase in mobile search usage, natural language has become an important query language. So far, most of the current systems are not able to process these queries because of the vagueness and…

Query expansion is a functionality of search engines that suggests a set of related queries for a user-issued keyword query. Typical corpus-driven keyword query expansion approaches return popular words in the results as expanded queries.…

A goal shared by artificial intelligence and information retrieval is to create an oracle, that is, a machine that can answer our questions, no matter how difficult they are. A more limited, but still instrumental, version of this oracle is…

To improve user experience, Alexa now allows users to consent to data sharing via voice rather than directing them to the companion smartphone app. While verbal consent mechanisms for voice assistants (VAs) can increase usability, they can…

Conversational search has seen increased recent attention in both the IR and NLP communities. It seeks to clarify and solve users' search needs through multi-turn natural language interactions. However, most existing systems are trained and…

Asking clarifying questions in response to search queries has been recognized as a useful technique for revealing the underlying intent of the query. Clarification has applications in retrieval systems with different interfaces, from the…

As the healthcare sector is facing major challenges, such as aging populations, staff shortages, and common chronic diseases, delivering high-quality care to individuals has become very difficult. Conversational agents have shown to be a…

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…

Alexa Skills are used for a variety of daily routines and purposes, but little research has focused on a key part of many people's daily lives: their pets. We present a systematic review categorizing the purposes of 88 Alexa Skills aimed at…

Amazon's Alexa is now widely available and shows interesting potential as a platform for hosting CALL games aimed at children. In this paper, we describe an initial informal experiment where we created some simple CALL games and made them…