| Morning Session | |
|---|---|
| 9:00 am | Opening Remarks |
| 9:10 am |
Keynote Towards Mixed-Initiative Conversational Search Hamed Zamani Microsoft AI Research, USA Abstract: While conversational search has roots in early information retrieval research, recent advances in automatic speech recognition and conversational agents as well as popularity of devices with limited bandwidth interfaces have led to increasing interest in this area. An ideal conversational search system requires to go beyond the typical “query-response” paradigm by supporting mixed-initiative interactions. In this talk, I will review the recent efforts on developing mixed-initiative conversational search systems and draw connections with early work on interactive information retrieval. I will describe methods for generating and evaluating clarifying questions in response to search queries. I will further highlight the connections between conversational search and recommendation, and finish with a discussion on the next steps that require significant progress in the context of mixed-initiative conversational search. |
| 10:00 am | Coffee Break |
| 10:30 am | Contributed Talk You Sound Like You Watch Action Movies: Towards Predicting Movie Preferences from Conversational Interactions Sergey Volokhin, Joyce Ho, Eugene Agichtein |
| 10:50 am | Invited Talk Future Directions in Alexa Shopping Research Vanessa Murdock Amazon, USA Abstract: Alexa Shopping at Amazon focuses on enabling users to shop with a multimodal device, driven by a voice interaction. Developing a customer-friendly shopping AI entails solving basic research problems such as natural language understanding, developing natural multi-turn dialogs, high-accuracy retrieval of sparse texts, and personalizing not just the result, but the interaction itself. In this talk we discuss commerce-specific open research problems facing Alexa in the coming years. |
| 11.30 am | Panel Discussion Trust, Transparency, Utility and Limitations of Conversational Search and Recommendation Systems for E-Commerce Eugene Agichtein Emory, USA Ed Chi Google, USA Vanessa Murdock Amazon, USA Emine Yilmaz University College London, UK Hamed Zamani Microsoft AI Research, USA |
| 12:30 pm | Lunch Break (Lunch not provided) |
| Afternoon Session | |
| 2:00 pm | Invited Talk Conversational agents for e-commerce: getting strong now Giuseppe “Pino” Di Fabbrizio Vui inc., USA Abstract: Recent advances in deep learning and natural language processing are fueling a new generation of conversational agents that are accurate and articulate in interacting with users on a broad range of subjects. A number of conversational systems are also making their way to specific verticals such as banking, financing, healthcare, and e-commerce, and targeting consumers while supplanting real agents at scale in email, live chats or other types of communications. Although conversational agents are rapidly growing, some verticals such as e-commerce are still far from a frictionless user experience where conversion rates are seamlessly completed with voice-only “zero-click” purchases. In this talk, we illustrate a typical architecture and machine learning pipeline that have been both successfully used to optimize e-commerce conversational systems and discuss challenges that currently limit scalability and adoption. |
| 2:40 pm | Contributed Talk MT-BioNER: Multi-task biomedical named entity recognition for conversational systems Muhammad Raza Khan, Morteza Ziyadi, Mohamed Abdelhady |
| 3:00 pm | Coffee Break |
| 3:30 pm | Invited Talk Conversational AI applications in Real Estate Andrei Lopatenko Zillow, USA Abstract: In this talk we will discuss applications of Conversational AI in Real Estate.We will discuss how natural language processing, dialog management and other technologies are applied to improve search experience for customers looking for new houses to rent or buy, to simplify various steps in the process of buying and selling a house, to help agents and sales representatives. We will discuss Conversational AI applications and core technologies in search, natural language to database intefaces, evaluation of human to human conversations, and goal oriented dialogs for particular business cases. |
| 4:10 pm | Invited Talk Overview of the 2019 Dagstuhl Seminar on Conversational Search Rishiraj Saha Roy MPII, Germany Abstract: This talk provides an overview of the Dagstuhl seminar on Conversational Search held in November 2019, that involved about 50 participants from the academia and the industry. We will first go over some of the highlights from the keynotes and invited talks. This will be followed by insights from the various breakout groups, that are a key element of Dagstuhl meetings. Finally, we will share some interesting anecdotes from the discussions and summarize takeaways from this very productive seminar. We will also try to mention logistic information aimed at workshop participants interested in similar endeavors for the future. Audience members are encouraged to chip in with curious comments to avoid this talk from becoming a boring report monologue. |
| 4:50 pm |
Group Discussion and Closing |