Conversational Agents: Theory and Applications
It is an incremental review summarizing existing knowledge for researchers and practitioners in AI and human-computer interaction.
The paper provides a review of conversational agents, covering chatbots, task-oriented agents, and embodied agents, including their dialogue representation, evaluation methods, and applications in health and education.
In this chapter, we provide a review of conversational agents (CAs), discussing chatbots, intended for casual conversation with a user, as well as task-oriented agents that generally engage in discussions intended to reach one or several specific goals, often (but not always) within a specific domain. We also consider the concept of embodied conversational agents, briefly reviewing aspects such as character animation and speech processing. The many different approaches for representing dialogue in CAs are discussed in some detail, along with methods for evaluating such agents, emphasizing the important topics of accountability and interpretability. A brief historical overview is given, followed by an extensive overview of various applications, especially in the fields of health and education. We end the chapter by discussing benefits and potential risks regarding the societal impact of current and future CA technology.