999 research outputs found
Report on the future conversations workshop at CHIIR 2021
The Future Conversations workshop at CHIIR’21 looked to the future of search, recommen- dation, and information interaction to ask: where are the opportunities for conversational interactions? What do we need to do to get there? Furthermore, who stands to benefit?The workshop was hands-on and interactive. Rather than a series of technical talks, we solicited position statements on opportunities, problems, and solutions in conversational search in all modalities (written, spoken, or multimodal). This paper –co-authored by the organisers and participants of the workshop– summarises the submitted statements and the discussions we had during the two sessions of the workshop. Statements discussed during the workshop are available at https://bit.ly/FutureConversations2021Statements
The Wizard of Curiosities: Enriching Dialogues with Fun Facts
Introducing curiosities in a conversation is a way to teach something new to
the person in a pleasant and enjoyable way. Enriching dialogues with
contextualized curiosities can improve the users' perception of a dialog system
and their overall user experience. In this paper, we introduce a set of curated
curiosities, targeting dialogues in the cooking and DIY domains. In particular,
we use real human-agent conversations collected in the context of the Amazon
Alexa TaskBot challenge, a multimodal and multi-turn conversational setting.
According to an A/B test with over 1000 conversations, curiosities not only
increase user engagement, but provide an average relative rating improvement of
9.7%
Enriching Word Embeddings with Food Knowledge for Ingredient Retrieval
Smart assistants and recommender systems must deal with lots of information coming from different sources and having different formats. This is more frequent in text data, which presents increased variability and complexity, and is rather common for conversational assistants or chatbots. Moreover, this issue is very evident in the food and nutrition lexicon, where the semantics present increased variability, namely due to hypernyms and hyponyms. This work describes the creation of a set of word embeddings based on the incorporation of information from a food thesaurus - LanguaL - through retrofitting. The ingredients were classified according to three different facet label groups. Retrofitted embeddings seem to properly encode food-specific knowledge, as shown by an increase on accuracy as compared to generic embeddings (+23%, +10% and +31% per group). Moreover, a weighing mechanism based on TF-IDF was applied to embedding creation before retrofitting, also bringing an increase on accuracy (+5%, +9% and +5% per group). Finally, the approach has been tested with human users in an ingredient retrieval exercise, showing very positive evaluation (77.3% of the volunteer testers preferred this method over a string-based matching algorithm)
"Mango Mango, How to Let The Lettuce Dry Without A Spinner?'': Exploring User Perceptions of Using An LLM-Based Conversational Assistant Toward Cooking Partner
The rapid advancement of the Large Language Model (LLM) has created numerous
potentials for integration with conversational assistants (CAs) assisting
people in their daily tasks, particularly due to their extensive flexibility.
However, users' real-world experiences interacting with these assistants remain
unexplored. In this research, we chose cooking, a complex daily task, as a
scenario to investigate people's successful and unsatisfactory experiences
while receiving assistance from an LLM-based CA, Mango Mango. We discovered
that participants value the system's ability to provide extensive information
beyond the recipe, offer customized instructions based on context, and assist
them in dynamically planning the task. However, they expect the system to be
more adaptive to oral conversation and provide more suggestive responses to
keep users actively involved. Recognizing that users began treating our LLM-CA
as a personal assistant or even a partner rather than just a recipe-reading
tool, we propose several design considerations for future development.Comment: Under submission to CHI202
The interplay between food knowledge, nudges, and preference elicitation methods determines the evaluation of a recipe recommender system
Domain knowledge can affect how a user evaluates different aspects of a recommender system. Recipe recommendations might be difficult to understand, as some health aspects are implicit. The appropriateness of a recommender’s preference elicitation (PE) method, whether users rate individual items or item attributes, may depend on the user’s knowledge level. We present an online recipe recommender experiment. Users (𝑁=360) with varying levels of subjective food knowledge faced different cognitive digital nudges (i.e., food labels) and PE methods. In a 3 (recipes annotated with no labels, Multiple Traffic Light (MTL) labels, or full nutrition labels) x2 (PE method : content-based PE or knowledge-based) between-subjects design. We observed a main effect of knowledge-based PE on the healthiness of chosen recipes, while MTL label only helped marginally. A Structural Equation Model analysis revealed that the interplay between user knowledge and the PE method reduced the perceived effort of using the system and in turn, affected choice difficulty and satisfaction. Moreover, the evaluation of health labels depends on a user’s level of food knowledge. Our findings emphasize the importance of user characteristics in the evaluation of food recommenders and the merit of interface and inter action aspects
RecipeGPT: Generative pre-training based cooking recipe generation and evaluation system
National Research Foundation (NRF) Singapore under International Research Centres in Singapore Funding Initiativ
Explainable Active Learning for Preference Elicitation
Gaining insights into the preferences of new users and subsequently
personalizing recommendations necessitate managing user interactions
intelligently, namely, posing pertinent questions to elicit valuable
information effectively. In this study, our focus is on a specific scenario of
the cold-start problem, where the recommendation system lacks adequate user
presence or access to other users' data is restricted, obstructing employing
user profiling methods utilizing existing data in the system. We employ Active
Learning (AL) to solve the addressed problem with the objective of maximizing
information acquisition with minimal user effort. AL operates for selecting
informative data from a large unlabeled set to inquire an oracle to label them
and eventually updating a machine learning (ML) model. We operate AL in an
integrated process of unsupervised, semi-supervised, and supervised ML within
an explanatory preference elicitation process. It harvests user feedback (given
for the system's explanations on the presented items) over informative samples
to update an underlying ML model estimating user preferences. The designed user
interaction facilitates personalizing the system by incorporating user feedback
into the ML model and also enhances user trust by refining the system's
explanations on recommendations. We implement the proposed preference
elicitation methodology for food recommendation. We conducted human experiments
to assess its efficacy in the short term and also experimented with several AL
strategies over synthetic user profiles that we created for two food datasets,
aiming for long-term performance analysis. The experimental results demonstrate
the efficiency of the proposed preference elicitation with limited user-labeled
data while also enhancing user trust through accurate explanations.Comment: Preprin
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