Proactive Conversational Agents

Conversational agents, or commonly known as dialogue systems, have gained escalating popularity in recent years. Their widespread applications support conversational interactions with users and accomplishing various tasks as personal assistants. However, one key weakness in existing conversational agents is that they only learn to passively answer user queries via training on pre-collected and manually-labeled data. Such passiveness makes the interaction modeling and system-building process relatively easier, but it largely hinders the possibility of being human-like hence lowering the user engagement level. In this tutorial, we introduce and discuss methods to equip conversational agents with the ability to interact with end users in a more proactive way. This three-hour tutorial is divided into three parts and includes two interactive exercises. It reviews and presents recent advancements on the topic, focusing on automatically expanding ontology space, actively driving conversation by asking questions or strategically shifting topics, and retrospectively conducting response quality control.