{"title":"Ah, Alright, Okay! Communicating Understanding in Conversational Product Search","authors":"A. Papenmeier, E. A. Topp","doi":"10.1145/3571884.3604318","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3571884.3604318","url":null,"abstract":"When talking about products, people often express their needs in vague terms with vocabulary that does not necessarily overlap with product descriptions written by retailers. This poses a problem for chatbots in online shops, as the vagueness and vocabulary mismatch can lead to misunderstandings. In human-human communication, people intuitively build a common understanding throughout a conversation, e.g., via feedback loops. To inform the design of conversational product search systems, we investigated the effect of different feedback behaviors on users’ perception of a chatbot’s competence and conversational engagement. Our results show that rephrasing the user’s input to express what was understood increases conversational engagement and gives the impression of a competent chatbot. Using a generic feedback acknowledgment (e.g., “right” or “okay”), however, does not increase engagement or perceived competence. Auto-feedback for conversational product search systems therefore needs to be designed with care.","PeriodicalId":127379,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Conversational User Interfaces","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114547221","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
N. Braunschweiler, R. Doddipatla, Simon Keizer, Svetlana Stoyanchev
{"title":"Enabling Semi-Structured Knowledge Access via a Question-Answering Module in Task-oriented Dialogue Systems","authors":"N. Braunschweiler, R. Doddipatla, Simon Keizer, Svetlana Stoyanchev","doi":"10.1145/3571884.3597138","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3571884.3597138","url":null,"abstract":"Users of task-oriented dialogue systems are often limited to ‘in-schema queries’, i.e., questions constrained by a predefined database structure. Providing access to additional semi- or unstructured knowledge could enable users to enter a wider range of queries answerable by the system. To this end, we have integrated a Question-Answering (QA)-module in an interactive restaurant search system and evaluated its impact using a crowd-sourced user evaluation. The QA-module includes knowledge selection and response generation components, both driven by fine-tuned GPT-2 language models, and a method to prevent responses unrelated to a user question (‘off-topic responses’). The results show that systems with QA-module are significantly preferred over the baseline without QA-module. Moreover, while the off-topic response prevention method was correctly triggered in 98.1% of questions not covered in the knowledge base, users showed more preference to the system that can retrieve information irrespective of whether it is relevant or not.","PeriodicalId":127379,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Conversational User Interfaces","volume":"80 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122048589","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Generative AI Considered Harmful","authors":"J. Fischer","doi":"10.1145/3571884.3603756","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3571884.3603756","url":null,"abstract":"The recent months have seen an explosion of interest, hype, and concern about generative AI, driven by the release of ChatGPT. In this article I seek to explicate some potential and actual harms of the engineering and use of generative AI such as ChatGPT. With this I also suggest a reframing for researchers with an interest in interaction. With this reframing I seek to provoke researchers to consider studying the settings of ChatGPT development and use as active sites of production. Research should focus on the organisational, technological and interactional practices and contexts in and through which generative AI and its outputs—harmful and otherwise—are produced, by whom, to what end, and with what consequences on societies.","PeriodicalId":127379,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Conversational User Interfaces","volume":"40 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127890198","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Christina Ziying Wei, Young-Ho Kim, Anastasia Kuzminykh
{"title":"The Bot on Speaking Terms: The Effects of Conversation Architecture on Perceptions of Conversational Agents","authors":"Christina Ziying Wei, Young-Ho Kim, Anastasia Kuzminykh","doi":"10.1145/3571884.3597139","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3571884.3597139","url":null,"abstract":"Conversational agents mimic natural conversation to interact with users. Since the effectiveness of interactions strongly depends on users’ perception of agents, it is crucial to design agents’ behaviors to provide the intended user perceptions. Research on human-agent and human-human communication suggests that speech specifics are associated with perceptions of communicating parties, but there is a lack of systematic understanding of how speech specifics of agents affect users’ perceptions. To address this gap, we present a framework outlining the relationships between elements of agents’ conversation architecture (dialog strategy, content affectiveness, content style and speech format) and aspects of users’ perception (interaction, ability, sociability and humanness). Synthesized based on literature reviewed from the domains of HCI, NLP and linguistics (n=57), this framework demonstrates both the identified relationships and the areas lacking empirical evidence. We discuss the implications of the framework for conversation design and highlight the inconsistencies with terminology and measurements.","PeriodicalId":127379,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Conversational User Interfaces","volume":"2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132708539","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
A. Brandt, S. Hazel, Rory Mckinnon, Kleopatra Sideridou, Joe Tindale, Nikoletta Ventoura
{"title":"From Writing Dialogue to Designing Conversation: Considering the potential of Conversation Analysis for Voice User Interfaces","authors":"A. Brandt, S. Hazel, Rory Mckinnon, Kleopatra Sideridou, Joe Tindale, Nikoletta Ventoura","doi":"10.1145/3571884.3603758","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3571884.3603758","url":null,"abstract":"Conversation design at least partly aspires to create Voice User Interfaces which emulate human speech production. And yet, there is no established approach for the development of naturalistic conversational infrastructure for VUIs; conversation designers are advised to work from their common sense understanding of conversation, producing written scripts, based on memory and imagination, which are later converted into speech. This is a shortcoming in conversation design which needs to be addressed. In this provocation paper, we argue that the starting point in the development of any VUI should be the examination of natural spoken conversation, preferably from the same interactional context in which the VUI will be deployed. We provide a short example to illustrate how the current process of conversation scriptwriting can be a barrier to this, and demonstrate how this can be overcome using the social scientific approach of Conversation Analysis (CA).","PeriodicalId":127379,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Conversational User Interfaces","volume":"16 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114356814","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Would People Mumble Rap to Alexa?","authors":"Casey C. Bennett, Minha Lee","doi":"10.1145/3571884.3603757","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3571884.3603757","url":null,"abstract":"Unclear speech, like mumbling, is difficult to understand for people, and even harder for conversational user interfaces (CUI) to process. Yet, there are multiple reasons why unintelligible speech is meaningful between humans, playing a critical role in social dynamics and status signaling that evolved in humans over time allowing us to form cohesive social groups for survival. For example in modern times, humans often use such changed speech in order to make themselves understandable only by in-group members, e.g. “mumble rap”, while subtly excluding out-group members. As such, we argue here that future CUIs must be attentive to how people use various forms of non-standard changed speech (e.g. mumbling, dialect, slang, inflection) to express themselves, lest CUIs be socially inept. Based on psychological, linguistic, and cross-cultural research, we point out several major challenges for researchers: 1) current CUIs typically omit non-standard speech like mumbling which are critical to human social communication, and 2) in the future humans may innately form ingroups with their personal CUIs resulting in speech behaviors meant to exclude outgroup members (both humans and machines). Both of those challenges require more research to address. Moreover, the use of changed speech for status signaling and ingroup/outgroup (IG/OG) signaling appears to be a phenomenon that varies across diverse cultures, languages, and situations, which CUI designers and engineers need to be mindful of going forward.","PeriodicalId":127379,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Conversational User Interfaces","volume":"37 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123904683","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
E. Basar, D. Balaji, Linwei He, Iris Hendrickx, Emiel Krahmer, G. de Bruijn, Tibor Bosse
{"title":"HyLECA: A Framework for Developing Hybrid Long-term Engaging Controlled Conversational Agents","authors":"E. Basar, D. Balaji, Linwei He, Iris Hendrickx, Emiel Krahmer, G. de Bruijn, Tibor Bosse","doi":"10.1145/3571884.3604404","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3571884.3604404","url":null,"abstract":"We present HyLECA, an open-source framework designed for the development of long-term engaging controlled conversational agents. HyLECA’s dialogue manager employs a hybrid architecture, combining rule-based methods for controlled dialogue flows with retrieval-based and generation-based approaches to enhance the utterance variability and flexibility. The motivation behind HyLECA lies in enhancing user engagement and enjoyment in task-oriented chatbots by leveraging the natural language generation capabilities of open-domain large language models within the confines of predetermined dialogue flows. Moreover, we discuss the technical capabilities, potential applications, relevance, and adaptability of the system. Lastly, we report preliminary findings from integrating state-of-the-art large language models in simulating a conversation centred on smoking cessation.","PeriodicalId":127379,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Conversational User Interfaces","volume":"22 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122630045","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
J. Peltola, K. Kaipainen, K. Keinonen, N. Kiuru, M. Turunen
{"title":"Developing A Conversational Interface for an ACT-based Online Program: Understanding Adolescents’ Expectations of Conversational Style","authors":"J. Peltola, K. Kaipainen, K. Keinonen, N. Kiuru, M. Turunen","doi":"10.1145/3571884.3597142","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3571884.3597142","url":null,"abstract":"A preventative approach is crucial for adolescents’ mental well-being, as problems often arise at a young age. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is an evidence-based intervention approach used to enhance psychological flexibility, a central factor in adolescents’ mental well-being. Conversational interfaces are recently being experimented with in mental health promotion. Their conversational style plays a significant role in creating meaningful experiences to achieve positive intervention outcomes. In this study, our objective was to understand adolescents’ expectations of the conversational style of a text-based virtual coach being developed as part of an ACT-based online program to support intervention engagement. We evaluated eight conversation scripts by collecting qualitative and quantitative data through an online survey from over 200 adolescents. Our findings provide insights on preferred conversational interface features regarding conversational style, including language use, artificiality, and empathy in the domain of adolescent mental well-being.","PeriodicalId":127379,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Conversational User Interfaces","volume":"144 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116604082","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Moral Transparency as a Mitigator of Moral Bias in Conversational User Interfaces","authors":"Joel Wester, Minha Lee, N. V. Berkel","doi":"10.1145/3571884.3603752","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3571884.3603752","url":null,"abstract":"From straightforward interactions to full-fledged open-ended dialogues, Conversational User Interfaces (CUIs) are designed to support end-user goals and follow their requests. As CUIs become more capable, investigating how to restrict or limit their ability to carry out user requests becomes increasingly critical. Currently, such intentionally constrained user interactions are accompanied by a generic explanation (e.g., “I’m sorry, but as an AI language model, I cannot say...”). We describe the role of moral bias in such user restrictions as a potential source of conflict between CUI users’ autonomy and system characterisation as generated by CUI designers. Just as the users of CUIs have diverging moral viewpoints, so do CUI designers—which either intentionally or unintentionally affects how CUIs communicate. Mitigating user moral biases and making the moral viewpoints of CUI designers apparent is a critical path forward in CUI design. We describe how moral transparency in CUIs can support this goal, as exemplified through intelligent disobedience. Finally, we discuss the risks and rewards of moral transparency in CUIs and outline research opportunities to inform the design of future CUIs.","PeriodicalId":127379,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Conversational User Interfaces","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127377414","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Laurette Marais, Ilana Wilken, L. Pretorius, L. Posthumus
{"title":"Multimodal, Multilingual Dynamic Stories for Literacy Development and Language Learning","authors":"Laurette Marais, Ilana Wilken, L. Pretorius, L. Posthumus","doi":"10.1145/3571884.3604303","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3571884.3604303","url":null,"abstract":"Early literacy acquisition has been shown to be life-changing. In resource-scarce multilingual, multicultural societies in which appropriately skilled human resources are scarce and the acquisition of early literacy is a huge challenge, the innovative and creative use of technology offers new ways of tackling this strategic educational challenge. Speech technology is particularly suited to this problem, since children can speak long before they can read and write. In this work we present the Ngiyaqonda! project, in which a multimodal learning environment is being developed to facilitate both literacy development and language learning, with the ultimate aim of solving a unique and pressing challenge facing South African foundation phase learners.","PeriodicalId":127379,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Conversational User Interfaces","volume":"14 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125259898","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}