Towards Human-centered Proactive Conversational Agents
It addresses the risk of PCAs being perceived as intrusive and aims to improve user experience and societal impact, though it is incremental as it builds on existing proactive systems.
This perspectives paper argues for shifting proactive conversational agents (PCAs) from a technology-centric focus to a human-centered approach that prioritizes user needs, expectations, and ethical considerations, proposing a new taxonomy based on Intelligence, Adaptivity, and Civility to guide future research.
Recent research on proactive conversational agents (PCAs) mainly focuses on improving the system's capabilities in anticipating and planning action sequences to accomplish tasks and achieve goals before users articulate their requests. This perspectives paper highlights the importance of moving towards building human-centered PCAs that emphasize human needs and expectations, and that considers ethical and social implications of these agents, rather than solely focusing on technological capabilities. The distinction between a proactive and a reactive system lies in the proactive system's initiative-taking nature. Without thoughtful design, proactive systems risk being perceived as intrusive by human users. We address the issue by establishing a new taxonomy concerning three key dimensions of human-centered PCAs, namely Intelligence, Adaptivity, and Civility. We discuss potential research opportunities and challenges based on this new taxonomy upon the five stages of PCA system construction. This perspectives paper lays a foundation for the emerging area of conversational information retrieval research and paves the way towards advancing human-centered proactive conversational systems.