A Survey on Proactive Dialogue Systems: Problems, Methods, and Prospects
It offers a first survey on proactive dialogue systems, which is incremental as it summarizes existing research without introducing new methods.
This survey provides a comprehensive overview of proactive dialogue systems, addressing the problem of enabling conversational agents to lead conversations toward predefined goals, and it aims to stimulate future progress in conversational AI.
Proactive dialogue systems, related to a wide range of real-world conversational applications, equip the conversational agent with the capability of leading the conversation direction towards achieving pre-defined targets or fulfilling certain goals from the system side. It is empowered by advanced techniques to progress to more complicated tasks that require strategical and motivational interactions. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive overview of the prominent problems and advanced designs for conversational agent's proactivity in different types of dialogues. Furthermore, we discuss challenges that meet the real-world application needs but require a greater research focus in the future. We hope that this first survey of proactive dialogue systems can provide the community with a quick access and an overall picture to this practical problem, and stimulate more progresses on conversational AI to the next level.