Kshitij Fadnis, Nathaniel Mills, Jatin Ganhotra, Haggai Roitman, Gaurav Pandey, Doron Cohen, Yosi Mass, Shai Erera, Chulaka Gunasekara, Danish Contractor, Siva Patel, Q. Vera Liao, Sachindra Joshi, Luis Lastras, David Konopnicki
| Challenge: | Using conversational approach to information retrieval for agent assistance, customer support agents are a critical part of an organization's customer support team. |
| Approach: | They propose a conversational approach to information retrieval for agent assistance that monitors an evolving conversation and recommends both responses and URLs of documents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system monitors an evolving conversation and recommends both responses and URLs of documents the agent can use in replies to their client. |
Similar Papers
Bringing the State-of-the-Art to Customers: A Neural Agent Assistant Framework for Customer Service Support (2022.emnlp-industry)
Copied to clipboard
Stephen Obadinma, Faiza Khan Khattak, Shirley Wang, Tania Sidhorn, Elaine Lau, Sean Robertson, Jingcheng Niu, Winnie Au, Alif Munim, Karthik Raja Kalaiselvi Bhaskar
| Challenge: | Creating agent assistants that can help improve customer service support requires inputs from industry users and their customers as well as knowledge of state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) technology. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine expertise from academia and industry to build task/domain-specific Neural Agent Assistants with three high-level components for: (1) Intent Identification, (2) Context Retrieval, and (3) Response Generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is based on three case studies of industry partners who successfully adapt the framework to their unique challenges. |
Conversational Document Prediction to Assist Customer Care Agents (2020.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Jatin Ganhotra, Haggai Roitman, Doron Cohen, Nathaniel Mills, Chulaka Gunasekara, Yosi Mass, Sachindra Joshi, Luis Lastras, David Konopnicki
| Challenge: | Using a conversational search system, the agent/system can ask clarification questions and interactively modify the search results as the conversation progresses. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a public dataset to analyze the task of predicting the documents that customer care agents can use to facilitate users’ needs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is more efficient than existing models and is more cost-effective than existing ones. |
AI Knowledge Assist: An Automated Approach for the Creation of Knowledge Bases for Conversational AI Agents (2025.emnlp-industry)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge base is time-consuming and deters the adoption of conversational AI systems in contact centers. |
| Approach: | They propose a system that extracts knowledge in the form of question-answer (QA) pairs from historical customeragent conversations to automatically build a knowledge base. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms larger closed-source LLMs on internal data and achieves above 90% accuracy in answering informationseeking questions. |
Getting To Know You: User Attribute Extraction from Dialogues (2020.lrec-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a new method to extract user attributes from dialogues is needed to improve user understanding. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage dialogues with conversational agents to automatically extract user attributes from dialogues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses retrieval and generation baselines on human evaluation. |
Enhancing Emotional Support Conversations: A Framework for Dynamic Knowledge Filtering and Persona Extraction (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing dialogue models struggle to interpret context accurately due to irrelevant or misclassified knowledge, limiting their effectiveness in real-world scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that dynamically filters relevant commonsense knowledge and extracts personalized information to improve empathetic dialogue generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing models in coherence, emotional understanding, and response relevance on the ESConv dataset. |
Cue-bot: A Conversational Agent for Assistive Technology (2022.acl-demo)
Copied to clipboard
Shachi H Kumar, Hsuan Su, Ramesh Manuvinakurike, Maximilian C. Pinaroc, Sai Prasad, Saurav Sahay, Lama Nachman
| Challenge: | Large-scale pre-training has achieved significant performance gains across many tasks within NLP, including intent prediction and dialogue state tracking. |
| Approach: | They propose to use eye-tracking, mouse controls and an intelligent agent Cue-bot to represent the user in a conversation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can be used by people with different levels of disabilities to interact with the world, supported by eye-tracking, mouse controls and an intelligent agent Cue-bot. |
One Agent To Rule Them All: Towards Multi-agent Conversational AI (2022.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Christopher Clarke, Joseph Peper, Karthik Krishnamurthy, Walter Talamonti, Kevin Leach, Walter Lasecki, Yiping Kang, Lingjia Tang, Jason Mars
| Challenge: | Increasing volume of conversational agents (CAs) on the market has resulted in users being burdened with learning and adopting multiple agents to accomplish their tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a task BBAI: Black-Box Agent Integration that integrates multiple black-box CAs at scale. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms existing benchmarks in the BBAI: Black-Box Agent Integration task. |
Minimal Yet Big Impact: How AI Agent Back-channeling Enhances Conversational Engagement through Conversation Persistence and Context Richness (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Increasing use of AI agents in conversational services highlights the importance of back-channeling (BC) as an active listening strategy to enhance conversational engagement. |
| Approach: | They conducted an experiment with 55 participants to evaluate conversational engagement using both quantitative and qualitative metrics. |
| Outcome: | The results show that the Todak_BC and TodAK_NoBC groups have significantly higher conversational engagement than the Todask_NoB. |
Spoken Conversational Agents with Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-tutorials)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | This tutorial focuses on the evolution of voice-native LLMs . it reviews the adaptation of text LLM to audio, cross-modal alignment, and joint speech–text training . |
| Approach: | This tutorial examines the evolution of voice-native LLMs in conversational agents . it compares cascaded and voice-based LLM systems to end-to-end retrieval-and vision-grounded systems . |
| Outcome: | This tutorial examines the evolution of voice-native LLMs . it compares the performance of voice assistants to current open-domain agents . |
Knowledge-centered conversational agents with a drive to learn (2024.naacl-srw)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Unlike traditional task-oriented dialogue agents, knowledgeable agents can autonomously determine what they know and do not know, what is the epistemic status of what they do not understand, and what they need to learn. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive conversational agent that assesses the quality of its knowledge and is driven to become more knowledgeable. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent can learn effective policies to acquire the knowledge needed by assessing the efficiency of these capabilities during interaction. |