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Conversational Interfaces for Information Search

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Understanding and Improving Information Search

Part of the book series: Human–Computer Interaction Series ((HCIS))

Abstract

Recent progress in machine learning has given rise to a plethora of tools and applications that rely on conversational interactions, from chatbots, speech-controlled devices to robots and virtual agents. Conversational interfaces are becoming widely accepted for utility tools, where a common function is to serve users’ information needs. Albeit with much excitement, we are only starting to understand how users’ information-seeking behaviors and design opportunities may transform moving from traditional graphical user interfaces to conversational user interfaces. In this chapter, we start by reviewing recent work in the emerging area of conversational interfaces and lay out their opportunities for supporting information search tasks. We then present insights from our experience deploying a chatbot supporting information search in a large enterprise, demonstrating how a conversational interface impacts user behaviors and offers new opportunities for improving search experience, in particular for user modeling.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. IBM Research AI, Yorktwon Heights, New York, NY, USA

    Q. Vera Liao

  2. IBM Research AI, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Werner Geyer, Michael Muller & Yasaman Khazaen

Authors
  1. Q. Vera Liao
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  2. Werner Geyer
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  3. Michael Muller
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  4. Yasaman Khazaen
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Correspondence to Q. Vera Liao .

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  1. Raytheon BBN Technologies, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Wai Tat Fu

  2. Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Herre van Oostendorp

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Liao, Q.V., Geyer, W., Muller, M., Khazaen, Y. (2020). Conversational Interfaces for Information Search. In: Fu, W., van Oostendorp, H. (eds) Understanding and Improving Information Search. Human–Computer Interaction Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38825-6_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38825-6_13

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