@inproceedings{su-etal-2024-language,
    title = "Language Agents: Foundations, Prospects, and Risks",
    author = "Su, Yu  and
      Yang, Diyi  and
      Yao, Shunyu  and
      Yu, Tao",
    editor = "Li, Jessy  and
      Liu, Fei",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Tutorial Abstracts",
    month = nov,
    year = "2024",
    address = "Miami, Florida, USA",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/Author-page-Marten-During-lu/2024.emnlp-tutorials.3/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.emnlp-tutorials.3",
    pages = "17--24",
    abstract = "Language agents are autonomous agents, usually powered by large language models, that can follow language instructions to carry out diverse and complex tasks in real-world or simulated environments. It is one of the most heated discussion threads in AI and NLP at present with many proof-of-concept efforts, yet there lacks a systematic account of the conceptual definition, theoretical foundation, promising directions, and risks of language agents. This proposed tutorial aspires to fill this gap by providing a conceptual framework of language agents as well as giving a comprehensive discussion on important topic areas including tool augmentation, grounding, reasoning and planning, multi-agent systems, and rissk and societal impact. Language played a critical role in the evolution of biological intelligence, and now artificial intelligence may be following a similar evolutionary path. This is remarkable and concerning at the same time. We hope this tutorial will provide a timely framework to facilitate constructive discussion on this important emerging topic."
}