Amid the rapid rise of agentic dialogue models, realistic user-simulator studies are essential for tuning effective conversation strategies. This work investigates a sales-oriented agent that adapts its dialogue based on user profiles spanning age, gender, and occupation. While age and gender influence overall performance, occupation produces the most pronounced differences in conversational intent. Leveraging this insight, we introduce a lightweight, occupation-conditioned strategy that guides the agent to prioritize intents aligned with user preferences, resulting in shorter and more successful dialogues. Our findings highlight the importance of rich simulator profiles and demonstrate how simple persona-informed strategies can enhance the effectiveness of sales-oriented dialogue systems.
MemORAI: Memory Organization and Retrieval via Adaptive Graph Intelligence for LLM Conversational Agents
Independent Researcher（独立研究者）；Hanoi University of Science and Technology（河内科学技术大学）；VNU University of Engineering and Technology（VNU工程大学）；Monash University（墨尔本大学）
Many businesses and consumers are extending the capabilities of voice-based services such as Amazon Alexa, Google Home, Microsoft Cortana, and Apple Siri to create custom voice experiences (also known as skills). As the number of these experiences increases, a key problem is the discovery of skills that can be used to address a user's request. In this paper, we focus on conversational skill discovery and present a conversational agent which engages in a dialog with users to help them find the skills that fulfill their needs. To this end, we start with a rule-based agent and improve it by using…
Center for Artificial Intelligence Research (CAiRE)（人工智能研究中心（CAiRE））；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
Personalized dialogue systems are an essential step toward better human-machine interaction. Existing personalized dialogue agents rely on properly designed conversational datasets, which are mostly monolingual (e.g., English), which greatly limits the usage of conversational agents in other languages. In this paper, we propose a multi-lingual extension of Persona-Chat, namely XPersona. Our dataset includes persona conversations in six different languages other than English for building and evaluating multilingual personalized agents. We experiment with both multilingual and cross-lingual trai…
This is the application document for the 2019 Amazon Alexa competition. We give an overall vision of our conversational experience, as well as a sample conversation that we would like our dialog system to achieve by the end of the competition. We believe personalization, knowledge, and self-play are important components towards better chatbots. These are further highlighted by our detailed system architecture proposal and novelty section. Finally, we describe how we would ensure an engaging experience, how this research would impact the field, and related work.
SAPIENT: Mastering Multi-turn Conversational Recommendation with Strategic Planning and Monte Carlo Tree Search
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Ohio State University, USA（计算机科学与工程系，俄亥俄州立大学）；Department of Biomedical Informatics, The Ohio State University, USA（生物医学信息学系，俄亥俄州立大学）；Translational Data Analytics Institute, The Ohio State University, USA（转化数据分析研究所，俄亥俄州立大学）
To hold a true conversation, an intelligent agent should be able to occasionally take initiative and recommend the next natural conversation topic. This is a challenging task. A topic suggested by the agent should be relevant to the person, appropriate for the conversation context, and the agent should have something interesting to say about it. Thus, a scripted, or one-size-fits-all, popularity-based topic suggestion is doomed to fail. Instead, we explore different methods for a personalized, contextual topic suggestion for open-domain conversations. We formalize the Conversational Topic Sugg…
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology（日本产业技术综合研究所）
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 promising technology to alleviate some of these issues. In the form of digital health assistants, they have the potential to improve the everyday life of the elderly and chronically ill people. This includes, for example, medication reminders, routine checks, or social chit-chat. In addition, conversational agents can satisfy the fundamental need of having acc…
University of California, Santa Cruz（加利福尼亚大学圣克鲁兹分校）；Rulai Inc.（Rulai公司）
We will demonstrate a conversational products recommendation agent. This system shows how we combine research in personalized recommendation systems with research in dialogue systems to build a virtual sales agent. Based on new deep learning technologies we developed, the virtual agent is capable of learning how to interact with users, how to answer user questions, what is the next question to ask, and what to recommend when chatting with a human user. Normally a descent conversational agent for a particular domain requires tens of thousands of hand labeled conversational data or hand written …
University of Trento（特伦托大学）；Fondazione Bruno Kessler（布鲁诺·凯斯勒基金会）；University of Konstanz（康斯坦茨大学）
Poor lifestyle represents a health risk factor and is the leading cause of morbidity and chronic conditions. The impact of poor lifestyle can be significantly altered by individual behavior change. Although the current shift in healthcare towards a long lasting modifiable behavior, however, with increasing caregiver workload and individuals' continuous needs of care, there is a need to ease caregiver's work while ensuring continuous interaction with users. This paper describes the design and validation of CoachAI, a conversational agent assisted health coaching system to support health interve…
Clarify User Expertise: Towards Proactive Conversational Agents Tailoring Responses to User Proficiency
School of Computing and Data Science, The University of Hong Kong（香港大学计算与数据科学学院）；Institute of Data Science, National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学数据科学研究所）；College of Computer Science, Sichuan University（四川大学计算机学院）
"I Like Sunnie More Than I Expected!": Exploring User Expectation and Perception of an Anthropomorphic LLM-based Conversational Agent for Well-Being Support
University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；Flourish Science（弗洛里什科学公司）；Northeastern University（东北大学）
In this paper, we focus on the personalized response generation for conversational systems. Based on the sequence to sequence learning, especially the encoder-decoder framework, we propose a two-phase approach, namely initialization then adaptation, to model the responding style of human and then generate personalized responses. For evaluation, we propose a novel human aided method to evaluate the performance of the personalized response generation models by online real-time conversation and offline human judgement. Moreover, the lexical divergence of the responses generated by the 5 personali…
A Personalized Conversational Benchmark: Towards Simulating Personalized Conversations
University of Southern California（南加州大学）；Adobe Research（Adobe研究院）；University of California, San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校）；Intel AI Research（英特尔人工智能研究）；University of Maryland, College Park（马里兰大学学院市分校）；Vanderbilt University（范德比大学）；Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University（弗吉尼亚理工学院和州立大学）；University of Notre Dame（诺特丹大学）；University of Oregon（俄勒冈大学）；University of Illinois Chicago（伊利诺伊大学芝加哥分校）；Arizona State University（亚利桑那州立大学）
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；University of California, Davis（加州大学戴维斯分校）；University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）
Developing intelligent persuasive conversational agents to change people's opinions and actions for social good is the frontier in advancing the ethical development of automated dialogue systems. To do so, the first step is to understand the intricate organization of strategic disclosures and appeals employed in human persuasion conversations. We designed an online persuasion task where one participant was asked to persuade the other to donate to a specific charity. We collected a large dataset with 1,017 dialogues and annotated emerging persuasion strategies from a subset. Based on the annota…
How to Leverage Personal Textual Knowledge for Personalized Conversational Information Retrieval
Université de Montréal（蒙特利尔大学）；Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学）；Beijing Jiaotong University（北京交通大学）；University of California, Riverside（加州大学河滨分校）
CharacterChat: Learning towards Conversational AI with Personalized Social Support
Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence, Renmin University of China（中国人民大学高瓴人工智能学院）；Wangxuan Institute of Computer Technology, Peking University（北京大学王选计算机技术研究所）；University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）
Conversational Intelligence requires that a person engage on informational, personal and relational levels. Advances in Natural Language Understanding have helped recent chatbots succeed at dialog on the informational level. However, current techniques still lag for conversing with humans on a personal level and fully relating to them. The University of Michigan's submission to the Alexa Prize Grand Challenge 3, Audrey, is an open-domain conversational chat-bot that aims to engage customers on these levels through interest driven conversations guided by customers' personalities and emotions. A…
Spoken language understanding (SLU) systems in conversational AI agents often experience errors in the form of misrecognitions by automatic speech recognition (ASR) or semantic gaps in natural language understanding (NLU). These errors easily translate to user frustrations, particularly so in recurrent events e.g. regularly toggling an appliance, calling a frequent contact, etc. In this work, we propose a query rewriting approach by leveraging users' historically successful interactions as a form of memory. We present a neural retrieval model and a pointer-generator network with hierarchical a…
Exploring the Potential of LLMs as Personalized Assistants: Dataset, Evaluation, and Analysis
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Seoul National University（电子与计算机工程系，首尔国立大学）；Interdisciplinary Program in Artificial Intelligence, Seoul National University（人工智能跨学科计划，首尔国立大学）；AIIS, ASRI, INMC, and ISRC, Seoul National University（人工智能研究所、人工智能研究机构、智能网络中心和智能系统研究组，首尔国立大学）
South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）；UBTECH Robotics Corp（优必选科技股份有限公司）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
Human language expression is based on the subjective construal of the situation instead of the objective truth conditions, which means that speakers' personalities and emotions after cognitive processing have an important influence on conversation. However, most existing datasets for conversational AI ignore human personalities and emotions, or only consider part of them. It's difficult for dialogue systems to understand speakers' personalities and emotions although large-scale pre-training language models have been widely used. In order to consider both personalities and emotions in the proce…
One Size doesn't Fit All: A Personalized Conversational Tutoring Agent for Mathematics Instruction
School of Computer Science, Wuhan University（武汉大学计算机学院）；DAMO Academy, Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴达摩院）；College of Computer and Cyber Security, Hebei Normal University（河北师范大学计算机与网络空间安全学院）
针对数学教学中学习者差异被忽视的问题，本文提出 PACE 个性化对话辅导智能体，结合学习风格画像、苏格拉底式反馈与个性化训练，提升教学适应性和学习效果。
University of California, Santa Barbara（加州大学圣塔芭芭拉分校）；Tencent（腾讯）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）
Neural conversational models have long suffered from the problem of inconsistency and lacking coherent personality. To address the issue, persona-based models capturing individual characteristics have been proposed, but they still face the dilemma of model adaption and data privacy. To break this dilemma, we propose a novel Federated Natural Language Generation (FedNLG) framework, which learns personalized representations from various dataset on distributed devices, and thus implements the personalized dialogue system efficiently and safely. FedNLG first pre-trains parameters of standard neura…
Current conversational AI systems aim to understand a set of pre-designed requests and execute related actions, which limits them to evolve naturally and adapt based on human interactions. Motivated by how children learn their first language interacting with adults, this paper describes a new Teachable AI system that is capable of learning new language nuggets called concepts, directly from end users using live interactive teaching sessions. The proposed setup uses three models to: a) Identify gaps in understanding automatically during live conversational interactions, b) Learn the respective …
Nara Institute of Science and Technology（奈良先端科学技术大学院大学）
A conversational recommender system (CRS) is a practical application for item recommendation through natural language conversation. Such a system estimates user interests for appropriate personalized recommendations. Users sometimes have various interests in different categories or genres, but existing studies assume a unique user interest that can be covered by closely related items. In this work, we propose to model such multiple user interests in CRS. We investigated its effects in experiments using the ReDial dataset and found that the proposed method can recommend a wider variety of items…
Conversational interfaces that allow for intuitive and comprehensive access to digitally stored information remain an ambitious goal. In this thesis, we lay foundations for designing conversational search systems by analyzing the requirements and proposing concrete solutions for automating some of the basic components and tasks that such systems should support. We describe several interdependent studies that were conducted to analyse the design requirements for more advanced conversational search systems able to support complex human-like dialogue interactions and provide access to vast knowle…
College of Information Sciences and Technology（信息科学与技术学院）；Pennsylvania State University（宾夕法尼亚州立大学）
From 2016 to 2018, we developed and deployed Chorus, a system that blends real-time human computation with artificial intelligence (AI) and has real-world, open conversations with users. We took a top-down approach that started with a working crowd-powered system, Chorus, and then created a framework, Evorus, that enables Chorus to automate itself over time. Over our two-year deployment, more than 420 users talked with Chorus, having over 2,200 conversation sessions. This line of work demonstrated how a crowd-powered conversational assistant can be automated over time, and more importantly, ho…
Exploring the Impact of Personality Traits on Conversational Recommender Systems: A Simulation with Large Language Models
Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Singapore Management University（新加坡管理大学）；Hong Kong Baptist University（香港浸会大学）；Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）
The University of Queensland（昆士兰大学）；Alibaba AI Lab（阿里巴巴人工智能实验室）；University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）
Conversational recommender systems (CRSs) have revolutionized the conventional recommendation paradigm by embracing dialogue agents to dynamically capture the fine-grained user preference. In a typical conversational recommendation scenario, a CRS firstly generates questions to let the user clarify her/his demands and then makes suitable recommendations. Hence, the ability to generate suitable clarifying questions is the key to timely tracing users' dynamic preferences and achieving successful recommendations. However, existing CRSs fall short in asking high-quality questions because: (1) syst…
