Recent research on proactive conversational agents (PCAs) mainly focuses on improving
the system's capabilities in anticipating and planning action sequences to accomplish tasks …

This research aims to explore various methods for assessing user feedback in mixed-
initiative conversational search (CS) systems. While CS systems enjoy profuse …

The ability to understand a user's underlying needs is critical for conversational systems,
especially with limited input from users in a conversation. Thus, in such a domain, Asking …

Identifying the right moment for a system to take the initiative is essential to conversational
information seeking (CIS). Existing studies have extensively studied the clarification need …

In conversational recommender systems (CRSs), conversations usually involve a set of
items and item-related entities or attributes, eg, director is a related entity of a movie. These …

The effectiveness of clarification question models in engaging users within search systems
is currently constrained, casting doubt on their overall usefulness. To improve the …

Given a conversation context, conversational question ranking (CQR) aims to select a
proper question from a candidate pool to clarify users' ambiguous information needs. Most …

Clarifying questions are an integral component of modern information retrieval systems,
directly impacting user satisfaction and overall system performance. Poorly formulated …

Conversational Product Search (CPS) provides an engaging way for users to find products
through effective natural language conversations. However, understanding the effect of …

In online search, it has always been a challenge to provide a way of search query that can
help users accurately express search intentions and encourage them to type easily. This …