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. |
Similar Papers
Agent Assist through Conversation Analysis (2020.emnlp-demos)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
It’s Not under the Lamppost: Expanding the Reach of Conversational AI (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Focused probes into the capabilities of language-based assistants easily reveal significant areas of brittleness that demonstrate large gaps in their coverage. |
| Approach: | They propose a process for collecting specific kinds of data to uncover these gaps and an annotation scheme for system responses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system includes both Conventional and GenAI systems, including ChatGPT and Bard/Gemini. |
Evaluating Very Long-Term Conversational Memory of LLM Agents (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies on long-term open-domain dialogues focus on evaluating responses within contexts spanning no more than five chat sessions. |
| Approach: | They propose a machine-human pipeline to generate very long-term dialogues by leveraging LLMs and retrieval augmented generation techniques. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline generates very long-term dialogues using LLMs and RAGs . the generated conversations are verified and edited by human annotators for long-range consistency and grounding to the event graphs. |
Image-Chat: Engaging Grounded Conversations (2020.acl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | In order for machines to communicate with humans, they must understand the natural things that humans say about the world they live in and respond in kind. |
| Approach: | They propose to fuse a set of neural architectures using image and text representations to achieve this goal. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs well on the Image-Chat task and humans prefer it 47.7% of the time. |
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 . |
KEEP CHATTING! An Attractive Dataset for Continuous Conversation Agents (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing works about persona dialogue such as PersonaChat have greatly facilitated the chatbot with configurable and persistent personalities. |
| Approach: | They propose to collect a dataset called ContinuousChat and rewrite it in style-specific ways to increase users' willingness to continue chatting. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model increases users' willingness to continue talking to the chatbot by increasing their personas to detailed-personas through experiences, daily life, future plans, or interesting stories. |
Human-like informative conversations: Better acknowledgements using conditional mutual information (2021.naacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing chatbots generate responses that are non-specific w.r.t. one of the contexts, typically the conversational history. |
| Approach: | They propose to build a dialogue agent that can weave new factual content into conversations as naturally as humans. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method trades off pmi for pcmi_h and is preferred by humans for overall quality over the Max-PMI baseline 60% of the time. |
Open Your Model’s Eyes: Video and Context-Aware Multimodal Backchannel Prediction (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for predicting backchannels rely on audio and text . existing methods omit visual cues and conversational contexts for accurate prediction . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages visual cues and conversational contexts to enhance backchannel prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods and simple multimodal baselines in recognizing complex backchannels such as empathy. |
Context-Agent: Dynamic Discourse Trees for Non-Linear Dialogue (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to managing non-linear dialogue flow are misaligned with the intrinsically hierarchical and branching structure of natural discourse. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that models multi-turn dialogue history as a dynamic tree structure. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enhances task completion rates and improves token efficiency across various LLMs. |
Joint Effects of Context and User History for Predicting Online Conversation Re-entries (P19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for predicting online conversation re-entry focus on modeling engagement patterns in ongoing conversations or ignoring the rich information in users' previous chatting history. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural framework with three main layers to model the conversation context and user history and their interactions with Twitter and Reddit to predict whether a user will return to a conversation they once participated in. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on two large-scale Twitter and Reddit conversations, and achieves an F1 score of 61.1 on Twitter conversations. |