Introduction
Conversational agents are becoming widely used for various tasks, domains and settings (e.g., personal assistants, shopping assistants, customer service agents, personal tutors). This increasing usage is driven by recent advances in artificial intelligence and natural language processing along with increasingly capable chat development environments, leading to improvements in conversational richness and robustness.
One of the reasons that conversational agents are embraced as an effective form of interaction is their ability to dynamically generate content and adapt to individual users. However, personified natural language interfaces often lead to high user expectations on sensing and adaptive capabilities, not only to satisfy individual information needs, but also to behave in socially appropriate or favorable ways.
Therefore, conversational agent systems present an extremely rich and challenging research space to address issues in user awareness and adaptation in many dimensions such as user profiles, contexts, personalities, emotions, conversational style, social dynamics, etc. Nowadays, the implementation of such systems often involves deep learning, reinforcement learning, active learning, and other machine learning approaches. It is important to consider how these interaction aspects should be handled by algorithms and system components such as language understanding, dialog management, and language generation, or in a setting of an end-to-end conversation modeling.
Adaptive interfaces have been a long-standing interest in the human-computer interaction (HCI) community, which often takes extensive effort in studying users, prototyping, and evaluating to design adaptive actions of computing systems. However, this effort is sometimes isolated from the challenges in developing the sensing capabilities of systems, and the opportunities in leveraging data-driven approaches and computational intelligence.
The purpose of this workshop is to bring together researchers in AI, NLP, user modeling, and HCI communities from both industry and academia. 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.
Workshop Plan
This will be a one-day workshop including paper, demo, and poster presentations, invited talks, and discussion sessions. Invited talks will feature leading experts on the topic from both HCI and AI perspectives. Discussion sessions will focus on enumerating key challenges in user-aware conversational agents and developing an interdisciplinary research agenda.
Important Dates
| Submission deadline: | 27 December 2019 |
| Notifications to authors: | 14 January 2020 |
| Camera-ready of accepted papers: | 17 January 2020 |
| Workshop date: | 17 March 2020 |