Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

7-2024

Abstract

Recent research on proactive conversational agents (PCAs) mainly focuses on improving the system's capabilities in anticipating and planning action sequences to accomplish tasks and achieve goals before users articulate their requests. This perspectives paper highlights the importance of moving towards building human-centered PCAs that emphasize human needs and expectations, and that considers ethical and social implications of these agents, rather than solely focusing on technological capabilities. The distinction between a proactive and a reactive system lies in the proactive system's initiative-taking nature. Without thoughtful design, proactive systems risk being perceived as intrusive by human users. We address the issue by establishing a new taxonomy concerning three key dimensions of human-centered PCAs, namely Intelligence, Adaptivity, and Civility. We discuss potential research opportunities and challenges based on this new taxonomy upon the five stages of PCA system construction. This perspectives paper lays a foundation for the emerging area of conversational information retrieval research and paves the way towards advancing human-centered proactive conversational systems.

Keywords

Proactive Agent, Conversational Agent, Human-centered Design

Discipline

Databases and Information Systems

Research Areas

Data Science and Engineering

Areas of Excellence

Digital transformation

Publication

SIGIR '24: Proceedings of the 47th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, Washington, DC, July 14-18

First Page

807

Last Page

818

ISBN

9798400704314

Identifier

10.1145/3626772.3657843

Publisher

ACM

City or Country

New York

Copyright Owner and License

Authors

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1145/3626772.3657843

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