Publication Type

Journal Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

2-2025

Abstract

Dialogue systems are designed to offer human users social support or functional services through natural language interactions. Traditional conversation research has put significant emphasis on a system's response-ability, including its capacity to understand dialogue context and generate appropriate responses. However, the key element of proactive behavior-a crucial aspect of intelligent conversations-is often overlooked in these studies. Proactivity empowers conversational agents to lead conversations towards achieving pre-defined targets or fulfilling specific goals on the system side. Proactive dialogue systems are equipped with advanced techniques to handle complex tasks, requiring strategic and motivational interactions, thus representing a significant step towards artificial general intelligence. Motivated by the necessity and challenges of building proactive dialogue systems, we provide a comprehensive review of various prominent problems and advanced designs for implementing proactivity into different types of dialogue systems, including open-domain dialogues, task-oriented dialogues, and information-seeking dialogues. We also discuss real-world challenges that require further research attention to meet application needs in the future, such as proactivity in dialogue systems that are based on large language models, proactivity in hybrid dialogues, evaluation protocols and ethical considerations for proactive dialogue systems. By providing a quick access and overall picture of the proactive dialogue systems domain, we aim to inspire new research directions and stimulate further advancements towards achieving the next level of conversational AI capabilities, paving the way for more dynamic and intelligent interactions within various application domains.

Keywords

Dialogue Systems, Proactivity, Open-domain Dialogue, Task-oriented Dialogue, Conversational Information Seeking

Discipline

Artificial Intelligence and Robotics | Databases and Information Systems

Research Areas

Intelligent Systems and Optimization

Areas of Excellence

Digital transformation

Publication

ACM Transactions on Information Systems

Volume

43

Issue

3

First Page

1

Last Page

45

ISSN

1046-8188

Identifier

10.1145/3715097

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)

Copyright Owner and License

Authors-CC-BY

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1145/3715097

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