Investigating Proactivity in Task-Oriented Dialogues

Proactivity (i.e., the capacity to provide useful information even when not explicitly required) is a fundamental characteristic of human dialogues. Although current task-oriented dialogue systems are good at providing information explicitly requested by the user, they are poor in exhibiting proactivity, which is typical in humanhuman interactions. In this study, we investigate the presence of proactive behaviours in several available dialogue collections, both human-human and humanmachine and show how the data acquisition decision affects the proactive behaviour present in the dataset. We adopt a two-step approach to semi-automatically detect proactive situations in the datasets, where proactivity is not annotated, and show that the dialogues collected with approaches that provide more freedom to the agent/user, exhibit high proactivity.