user2agent
Workshop on User-Aware Conversational Agents
In conjunction with ACM IUI 2019, Los Angeles, CA, USA, March 20, 2019

Introduction

Conversational agents are becoming increasingly used for various tasks, domains, and settings (e.g., personal assistants, customer service agents, intelligent tutors, and more), driven by recent advances in artificial intelligence and natural language processing. One major interaction benefit of conversational interfaces is the ability to dynamically generate contents and adapt to individual users. However, such personified designs of conversational agents often lead to advanced user expectations regarding the system’s sensing and adaptive capabilities. Users expect such agents to not only satisfy their individual information needs, but to also behave in socially appropriate or favorable ways.

Therefore, conversational agent systems present an extremely rich and challenging research space for addressing many aspects of user awareness and adaptation, such as user profiles, contexts, personalities, emotions, social dynamics, conversational styles, etc. Adaptive interfaces are a long-standing interest for the HCI community, which has often made extensive efforts to study users, and prototype, evaluate, and design adaptive actions of computing systems. However, these efforts are sometimes isolated from the challenges of developing the sensing capabilities of systems, and the opportunities of leveraging data-driven approaches and computational intelligence.

Meanwhile, increasingly more advanced machine learning approaches are introduced in new generations of conversational agents, such as deep learning, reinforcement learning, and active learning. It is imperative to consider how various aspects of user-awareness should be handled by these new techniques and system components for language understanding, language generation, dialog management, and in settings of end-to-end conversation modeling.

The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers in HCI, user modeling, and the AI and NLP communities from both industry and academia, who are interested in advancing the state-of-the-art on the topic of user-aware conversational agents. Through a focused and open exchange of ideas and discussions, we will work to identify central research topics in user-aware conversational agents and develop a strong interdisciplinary foundation to address them. With its focus on the intersection of HCI and AI communities, we strongly believe IUI is an ideal venue in which to hold this workshop.

The workshop solicits submissions in all aspects of user-aware and adaptive conversational agents including:
• User modeling for conversational agents and multi-modal interactions
• Sensing capabilities of agents (e.g., emotion, personality, contexts, social dynamic, etc.)
• Agent adaptation through language generation, dialog management and conversation modeling
• Personalization and adaptation algorithms inspired by behavioral or psychological theories
• Adapting agent interactions for user engagement
• Transparency and control of adaptive agents
• Novel methods for evaluating adaptive agents
• User interactions with and perceptions of adaptive agents
• Case studies of adaptive agents for different uses cases (e.g. collaborative tasks, decision support, social agent) and different domains (e.g. healthcare, finance, education)

Workshop Plan

This will be a half-day workshop including keynote speakers, papers, posters, and discussion sessions. Discussion sessions will focus on enumerating key challenges in user-aware conversational agents and developing an interdisciplinary research agenda.

Based on the results of the workshop, we plan to organize a special journal issue of the ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems (TIIS) on this topic.

Program

2:00 - 2:15 PMWelcome

2:15 - 3:15 PMKeynote 1:

• Bio

  Dr. Maxine Eskenazi is Principal Systems Scientist in the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. Her interests lie in dialog and intelligent agents, crowdsourcing, and data collection. She is the author of two books and numerous scientific papers and is on the editorial board of Computer Speech and Language. She is Head of the Dialog Research Center (DialRC) at Carnegie Mellon.

3:15 - 3:45 PMSession 1:

Building Real-World Chatbot Interviewers: Lessons from a Wizard-of-Oz Field Study
Michelle Zhou (Juji, Inc.), Carolyn Wang (Columbia University), Gloria Mark (University of California, Irvine), Huahai Yang (Juji, Inc.), and Kevin Xu (University of Pennsylvania)

Dialogue Design and Management for Multi-Session Casual Conversation with Older Adults
Zahra Razavi, Lenhart Schubert, Benjamin Kane, Mohammad Rafayet Ali, Kimberly A. Van Orden, and Tianyi Ma (University of Rochester)

3:45 - 4:00 PMBreak

4:00 - 5:00 PMKeynote 2:

• Bio

  David Traum is the Director for Natural Language Research at the Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) and Research Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Southern California (USC). He leads the Natural Language Dialogue Group at ICT. Traum’s research focuses on dialogue communication between human and artificial agents. He has engaged in theoretical, implementational, and empirical approaches to the problem, studying human-human natural language and multi-modal dialogue, as well as building a number of dialogue systems to communicate with human users. Traum has authored over 250 refereed technical articles. He is a founding editor of the journal Dialogue and Discourse, has chaired and served on many conference program committees, and is a past President of SIGDIAL, the international special interest group in discourse and dialogue. Traum earned his Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Rochester in 1994.

5:00 - 6:00 PMSession 2:

Building Jarvis - A Learner-Aware Conversational Trainer
Shiwali Mohan, Kalai Ramea, Bob Price, Matthew Shreve, Hoda Eldardiry, and Les Nelson, PARC (Palo Alto Research Center)

CORK: A COnversational Agent FramewoRK Exploiting Both Rational and Emotional Intelligence
Fabio Catania, Micol Spitale, Davide Fisicaro, and Franca Garzotto (Politecnico di Milano)

PRIMER: An Emotionally Aware Virtual Agent
Carla Gordon, Anton Leuski, Grace Benn, Eric Klassen, Edward Fast, Matt Liewer, Arno Hartholt, and David Traum (USC Institute for Creative Technologies)

Evaluating Voice Applications by User-Aware Design Guidelines Using an Automatic Voice Crawler
Xu Han and Tom Yeh (University of Colorado Boulder)

Submission

IUI-user2agent encourages original and relevant work of two publication types:

• full papers (up to 10 pages), including work in progress, perspective papers, and lessons learned. They will be presented either as oral presentations or posters.
• position papers (up to 4 pages), which will be presented as posters with a possibility to be accompanied by a demo.

All papers should follow ACM SIGCHI templates: https://sigchi.org/templates/, and submitted electronically as a single PDF file through the EasyChair submission system: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=user2agent.

All submissions will undergo a peer-review process. Reviewers will consider originality, significance, technical soundness, clarity, and relevance to the workshop’s topics. The reviewing process will be double-blind.

Organizing Committee

• Yasaman Khazaeni, IBM Research AI, Cambridge Research Lab, USA
  
• Q. Vera Liao, IBM Research AI, TJ Watson Research Center, USA
  
• Michal Shmueli-Scheuer, IBM Research AI, Haifa Research Lab, Israel
  
• Tsung-Hsien (Shawn) Wen, PolyAI, UK
  
• Zhou Yu, University of California, Davis, USA
  

Steering Committee

• Mari Ostendorf, University of Washington
• Alex Rudnicky, CMU
• Marilyn Walker, University of California, Santa Cruz
• Michelle X. Zhou, Juji.io

Program Committee

• Yun-Nung (Vivian) Chen, National Taiwan University
• Maxine Eskenazi, CMU
• Adam Fourney, Microsoft Research
• Jonathan Herzig, Tel-Aviv University
• Tianran Hu, University of Rochester
• Kenneth Huang, Pennsylvania State University
• Bernd Huber, Harvard University
• Werner Geyer, IBM Research AI
• Stefan Kopp, Bielefeld University
• Yukiko Nakano, Seikei University
• Ameneh Shamekhi, Northeastern University
• Tanmay Sinha, ETH Zurich
• Eddy Su, PolyAI
• Stefan Ultes, University of Cambridge
• Rajan Vaish, Snap Research