Empathy is a vital factor that contributes to mutual understanding, and joint problem-solving. In recent years, a growing number of studies have recognized the benefits of empathy and started to incorporate empathy in conversational systems. We refer to this topic as empathetic conversational systems. To identify the critical gaps and future opportunities in this topic, this paper examines this rapidly growing field using five review dimensions: (i) conceptual empathy models and frameworks, (ii) adopted empathy-related concepts, (iii) datasets and algorithmic techniques developed, (iv) evaluation strategies, and (v) state-of-the-art approaches. The findings show that most studies have centered on the use of the EMPATHETICDIALOGUES dataset, and the text-based modality dominates research in this field. Studies mainly focused on extracting features from the messages of the users and the conversational systems, with minimal emphasis on user modeling and profiling. Notably, studies that have incorporated emotion causes, external knowledge, and affect matching in the response generation models, have obtained significantly better results. For implementation in diverse real-world settings, we recommend that future studies should address key gaps in areas of detecting and authenticating emotions at the entity level, handling multimodal inputs, displaying more nuanced empathetic behaviors, and encompassing additional dialogue system features.

The goal of building dialogue agents that can converse with humans naturally has been a long-standing dream of researchers since the early days of artificial intelligence. The well-known Turing Test proposed to judge the ultimate validity of an artificial intelligence agent on the indistinguishability of its dialogues from humans'. It should come as no surprise that human-level dialogue systems are very challenging to build. But, while early effort on rule-based systems found limited success, the emergence of deep learning enabled great advance on this topic. In this thesis, we focus on methods that address the numerous issues that have been imposing the gap between artificial conversational agents and human-level interlocutors. These methods were proposed and experimented with in ways that were inspired by general state-of-the-art AI methodologies. But they also targeted the characteristics that dialogue systems possess.

Any organization needs to improve their products, services, and processes. In this context, engaging with customers and understanding their journey is essential. Organizations have leveraged various techniques and technologies to support customer engagement, from call centres to chatbots and virtual agents. Recently, these systems have used Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to analyze large volumes of customer feedback and engagement data. The goal is to understand customers in context and provide meaningful answers across various channels. Despite multiple advances in Conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Recommender Systems (RS), it is still challenging to understand the intent behind customer questions during the customer journey. To address this challenge, in this paper, we study and analyze the recent work in Conversational Recommender Systems (CRS) in general and, more specifically, in chatbot-based CRS. We introduce a pipeline to contextualize the input utterances in conversations. We then take the next step towards leveraging reverse feature engineering to link the contextualized input and learning model to support intent recognition. Since performance evaluation is achieved based on different ML models, we use transformer base models to evaluate the proposed approach using a labelled dialogue dataset (MSDialogue) of question-answering interactions between information seekers and answer providers.

Expressing empathy is important in everyday conversations, and exploring how empathy arises is crucial in automatic response generation. Most previous approaches consider only a single factor that affects empathy. However, in practice, empathy generation and expression is a very complex and dynamic psychological process. A listener needs to find out events which cause a speaker's emotions (emotion cause extraction), project the events into some experience (knowledge extension), and express empathy in the most appropriate way (communication mechanism). To this end, we propose a novel approach, which integrates the three components - emotion cause, knowledge graph, and communication mechanism for empathetic response generation. Experimental results on the benchmark dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our method and show that incorporating the key components generates more informative and empathetic responses.

In this chapter, we review and discuss the transformation of AI technology in HCI/UX work and assess how AI technology will change how we do the work. We first discuss how AI can be used to enhance the result of user research and design evaluation. We then discuss how AI technology can be used to enhance HCI/UX design. Finally, we discuss how AI-enabled capabilities can improve UX when users interact with computing systems, applications, and services.

This paper aims to provide a radical rundown on Conversation Search (ConvSearch), an approach to enhance the information retrieval method where users engage in a dialogue for the information-seeking tasks. In this survey, we predominantly focused on the human interactive characteristics of the ConvSearch systems, highlighting the operations of the action modules, likely the Retrieval system, Question-Answering, and Recommender system. We labeled various ConvSearch research problems in knowledge bases, natural language processing, and dialogue management systems along with the action modules. We further categorized the framework to ConvSearch and the application is directed toward biomedical and healthcare fields for the utilization of clinical social technology. Finally, we conclude by talking through the challenges and issues of ConvSearch, particularly in Bio-Medicine. Our main aim is to provide an integrated and unified vision of the ConvSearch components from different fields, which benefit the information-seeking process in healthcare systems.

本次调查绘制了用于分析社交媒体数据的生成方法的研究状态的广泛的全景照片（Sota）。它填补了空白，因为现有的调查文章在其范围内或被约会。我们包括两个重要方面，目前正在挖掘和建模社交媒体的重要性：动态和网络。社会动态对于了解影响影响或疾病的传播，友谊的形成，友谊的形成等，另一方面，可以捕获各种复杂关系，提供额外的洞察力和识别否则将不会被注意的重要模式。

问答系统被认为是流行且经常有效的信息在网络上寻求信息的手段。在这样的系统中，寻求信息者可以通过自然语言提出问题来获得对他们的查询的简短回应。交互式问题回答是一种最近提出且日益流行的解决方案，它位于问答和对话系统的交集。一方面，用户可以以普通语言提出问题，并找到对她的询问的实际回答；另一方面，如果在初始请求中有多个可能的答复，很少或歧义，则系统可以将问题交通会话延长到对话中。通过允许用户提出更多问题，交互式问题回答使用户能够与系统动态互动并获得更精确的结果。这项调查提供了有关当前文献中普遍存在的交互式提问方法的详细概述。它首先要解释提问系统的基本原理，从而定义新的符号和分类法，以将所有已确定的作品结合在统一框架内。然后，根据提出的方法，评估方法和数据集/应用程序域来介绍和检查有关交互式问题解答系统的审查已发表的工作。我们还描述了围绕社区提出的特定任务和问题的趋势，从而阐明了学者的未来利益。 GitHub页面的综合综合了本文献研究中涵盖的所有主要主题，我们的工作得到了进一步的支持。 https://sisinflab.github.io/interactive-question-answering-systems-survey/

以任务为导向的对话系统（TODS）继续升高，因为各种行业发现有效地利用其能力，节省时间和金钱。然而，即使是最先进的TOD尚未达到其全部潜力。TOD通常具有主要设计专注于完成手头的任务，因此任务分辨率的度量应优先考虑。可能会忽略可能指向对话的其他可能指向成功或其他方面的会话质量属性。这可能导致人类和对话系统之间的相互作用，让用户不满意或沮丧。本文探讨了对话系统的评价框架的文献，以及对话系统中的会话质量属性的作用，看起来，如何以及在与对话系统的性能相关的情况下，如何相关。

在口头对话系统中，我们的目标是部署人工智能，以建立可以与人类交流的自动化对话剂。对话系统越来越多地旨在超越仅仅模仿对话，而且随着时间的推移，这些交互也会改善。在本次调查中，我们概述了多年来制定对话系统的方法的广泛概述。对话系统的不同用例范围从基于任务的系统到开放域聊天动机和需要特定的系统。从简单的规则的系统开始，研究已经朝着越来越复杂的建筑培训，这些建筑在大规模的数据集语料库中培训，如深度学习系统。激进了类似人类对话的直觉，通过加强学习将情绪纳入自然语言发生器的进展。虽然我们看到对某些指标的高度边际改善的趋势，但我们发现指标存在有限的理由，评估实践并不统一。要得出结论，我们标志着这些问题并突出了可能的研究方向。

以任务为导向的对话系统（TDSS）主要在离线设置或人类评估中评估。评估通常仅限于单转或非常耗时。作为替代方案，模拟用户行为的用户模拟器使我们能够考虑一组广泛的用户目标，以生成类似人类的对话以进行模拟评估。使用现有的用户模拟器来评估TDSS是具有挑战性的，因为用户模拟器主要旨在优化TDSS的对话策略，并且评估功能有限。此外，对用户模拟器的评估是一个开放的挑战。在这项工作中，我们提出了一个用于端到端TDS评估的隐喻用户模拟器，如果它在与系统的交互中模拟用户的类似思维，则定义模拟器是隐喻的。我们还提出了一个基于测试人员的评估框架，以生成变体，即具有不同功能的对话系统。我们的用户模拟器构建了一个隐喻的用户模型，该模型通过参考遇到新项目时的先验知识来帮助模拟器进行推理。我们通过检查模拟器与变体之间的模拟相互作用来估计模拟器的质量。我们的实验是使用三个TDS数据集进行的。与基于议程的模拟器和三个数据集上的SEQ2SEQ模型相比，隐喻用户模拟器与手动评估的一致性更好。我们的测试人员框架展示了效率，并且可以更好地概括和可扩展性，因为它可以适用于多个域中的对话和多个任务，例如对话建议和电子商务对话。

情绪分析中最突出的任务是为文本分配情绪，并了解情绪如何在语言中表现出来。自然语言处理的一个重要观察结果是，即使没有明确提及情感名称，也可以通过单独参考事件来隐式传达情绪。在心理学中，被称为评估理论的情感理论类别旨在解释事件与情感之间的联系。评估可以被形式化为变量，通过他们认为相关的事件的人们的认知评估来衡量认知评估。其中包括评估事件是否是新颖的，如果该人认为自己负责，是否与自己的目标以及许多其他人保持一致。这样的评估解释了哪些情绪是基于事件开发的，例如，新颖的情况会引起惊喜或不确定后果的人可能引起恐惧。我们在文本中分析了评估理论对情绪分析的适用性，目的是理解注释者是否可以可靠地重建评估概念，如果可以通过文本分类器预测，以及评估概念是否有助于识别情感类别。为了实现这一目标，我们通过要求人们发短信描述触发特定情绪并披露其评估的事件来编译语料库。然后，我们要求读者重建文本中的情感和评估。这种设置使我们能够衡量是否可以纯粹从文本中恢复情绪和评估，并为判断模型的绩效指标提供人体基准。我们将文本分类方法与人类注释者的比较表明，两者都可以可靠地检测出具有相似性能的情绪和评估。我们进一步表明，评估概念改善了文本中情绪的分类。

深度神经语言模型的最新进展与大规模数据集的能力相结合，加速了自然语言生成系统的发展，这些系统在多种任务和应用程序上下文中产生流利和连贯的文本（在各种成功程度上）。但是，为所需的用户控制这些模型的输出仍然是一个开放的挑战。这不仅对于自定义生成语言的内容和样式至关重要，而且对于他们在现实世界中的安全可靠部署至关重要。我们提出了一项关于受约束神经语言生成的新兴主题的广泛调查，在该主题中，我们通过区分条件和约束（后者是在输出文本上而不是输入的可检验条件），正式定义和分类自然语言生成问题，目前是可检验的）约束文本生成任务，并查看受限文本生成的现有方法和评估指标。我们的目的是强调这个新兴领域的最新进展和趋势，以告知最有希望的方向和局限性，以推动受约束神经语言生成研究的最新作品。

个人之间日常谈话的关键特征是能够向他人表达同理心，并探索实施同理心的方法是对人类对话系统的关键步骤。本主题的先前方法主要集中在检测和利用用户的情绪以产生同理反应。但是，由于同情包括感情和认知的两个方面，我们认为除了识别用户的情绪之外，还应该考虑对用户情况的认知理解。为此，我们提出了一种新的方法来实现同志响应生成，它利用致辞来绘制更多信息的信息，并使用这些附加信息来进一步增强所生成的响应中的同情表达。我们在EmpatheticDialogues上评估我们的方法，这是一个广泛使用的基准数据集，用于致力于响应生成。经验结果表明，我们的方法在自动和人类评估中表明了基线模型，可以产生更丰富的信息和致力学的反应。

本文对过去二十年来对自然语言生成（NLG）的研究提供了全面的审查，特别是与数据到文本生成和文本到文本生成深度学习方法有关，以及NLG的新应用技术。该调查旨在（a）给出关于NLG核心任务的最新综合，以及该领域采用的建筑;（b）详细介绍各种NLG任务和数据集，并提请注意NLG评估中的挑战，专注于不同的评估方法及其关系;（c）强调一些未来的强调和相对近期的研究问题，因为NLG和其他人工智能领域的协同作用而增加，例如计算机视觉，文本和计算创造力。

旨在用自然语言和谐地与人类交流的智能对话体系对于促进人工智能时代的人机互动的发展非常出色。有了逐渐复杂的人类计算机交互要求（例如，多模式输入，时间敏感性），传统的基于文本的对话系统很难满足对更加生动和方便的交互的需求。因此，视觉背景增强对话系统（VAD）有可能通过感知和理解多模式信息（即图像或视频中的视觉上下文，文本对话历史记录）与人类进行交流，已成为主要的研究范式。 VAD受益于视觉和文本上下文之间的一致性和互补性，具有产生引人入胜和背景感知响应的潜力。为了描述VAD的开发，我们首先表征VAD的概念和独特功能，然后介绍其通用系统体系结构以说明系统工作流程。随后，对一些研究挑战和代表性作品进行了详细研究，然后进行了权威基准摘要。我们通过提出一些开放问题和有前途的VAD研究趋势来结束本文，例如，在跨模式对话环境下，人机对话的认知机制以及知识增强的跨模式语义互动。

Using chatbots to deliver recommendations is increasingly popular. The design of recommendation chatbots has primarily been taking an information-centric approach by focusing on the recommended content per se. Limited attention is on how social connection and relational strategies, such as self-disclosure from a chatbot, may influence users' perception and acceptance of the recommendation. In this work, we designed, implemented, and evaluated a social chatbot capable of performing three different levels of self-disclosure: factual information (low), cognitive opinions (medium), and emotions (high). In the evaluation, we recruited 372 participants to converse with the chatbot on two topics: movies and COVID-19 experiences. In each topic, the chatbot performed small talks and made recommendations relevant to the topic. Participants were randomly assigned to four experimental conditions where the chatbot used factual, cognitive, emotional, and adaptive strategies to perform self-disclosures. By training a text classifier to identify users' level of self-disclosure in real-time, the adaptive chatbot can dynamically match its self-disclosure to the level of disclosure exhibited by the users. Our results show that users reciprocate with higher-level self-disclosure when a recommendation chatbot consistently displays emotions throughout the conversation. Chatbot's emotional disclosure also led to increased interactional enjoyment and more positive interpersonal perception towards the bot, fostering a stronger human-chatbot relationship and thus leading to increased recommendation effectiveness, including a higher tendency to accept the recommendation. We discuss the understandings obtained and implications to future design.

Natural Language Generation (NLG) has improved exponentially in recent years thanks to the development of sequence-to-sequence deep learning technologies such as Transformer-based language models. This advancement has led to more fluent and coherent NLG, leading to improved development in downstream tasks such as abstractive summarization, dialogue generation and data-to-text generation. However, it is also apparent that deep learning based generation is prone to hallucinate unintended text, which degrades the system performance and fails to meet user expectations in many real-world scenarios. To address this issue, many studies have been presented in measuring and mitigating hallucinated texts, but these have never been reviewed in a comprehensive manner before. In this survey, we thus provide a broad overview of the research progress and challenges in the hallucination problem in NLG. The survey is organized into two parts: (1) a general overview of metrics, mitigation methods, and future directions; and (2) an overview of task-specific research progress on hallucinations in the following downstream tasks, namely abstractive summarization, dialogue generation, generative question answering, data-to-text generation, machine translation, and visual-language generation. This survey serves to facilitate collaborative efforts among researchers in tackling the challenge of hallucinated texts in NLG.

讽刺可以被定义为说或写讽刺与一个人真正想表达的相反，通常是为了侮辱，刺激或娱乐某人。由于文本数据中讽刺性的性质晦涩难懂，因此检测到情感分析研究社区的困难和非常感兴趣。尽管讽刺检测的研究跨越了十多年，但最近已经取得了一些重大进步，包括在多模式环境中采用了无监督的预训练的预训练的变压器，并整合了环境以识别讽刺。在这项研究中，我们旨在简要概述英语计算讽刺研究的最新进步和趋势。我们描述了与讽刺有关的相关数据集，方法，趋势，问题，挑战和任务，这些数据集，趋势，问题，挑战和任务是无法检测到的。我们的研究提供了讽刺数据集，讽刺特征及其提取方法以及各种方法的性能分析，这些表可以帮助相关领域的研究人员了解当前的讽刺检测中最新实践。

良好的善解人意对话系统应首先跟踪并理解用户的情绪，然后以适当的情感回复。但是，目前对此任务的方法要么集中于提高对用户情绪的理解或提出更好的反应策略，而且很少有作品同时考虑这两种工作。我们的工作试图填补这一空缺。受到任务导向对话系统的启发，我们提出了一种具有情感感知对话管理的新颖善解人意的响应生成模型。情绪感知对话管理包含两个部分：（1）情绪状态跟踪保持当前用户的情绪状态，（2）善解人意的对话策略选择预测目标情绪和用户的意图，基于情绪状态跟踪的结果。然后，预测信息用于指导响应的产生。实验结果表明，与自动评估和人类评估下的几个基准相比，动态管理不同的信息可以帮助模型产生更多的移情反应。