A Comparison of Explicit and Implicit Proactive Dialogue Strategies for Conversational Recommendation

Matthias Kraus, Fabian Fischbach, Pascal Jansen, Wolfgang Minker

Abstract
Recommendation systems aim at facilitating information retrieval for users by taking into account their preferences. Based on previous user behaviour, such a system suggests items or provides information that a user might like or find useful. Nonetheless, how to provide suggestions is still an open question. Depending on the way a recommendation is communicated influences the user’s perception of the system. This paper presents an empirical study on the effects of proactive dialogue strategies on user acceptance. Therefore, an explicit strategy based on user preferences provided directly by the user, and an implicit proactive strategy, using autonomously gathered information, are compared. The results show that proactive dialogue systems significantly affect the perception of human-computer interaction. Although no significant differences are found between implicit and explicit strategies, proactivity significantly influences the user experience compared to reactive system behaviour. The study contributes new insights to the human-agent interaction and the voice user interface design. Furthermore, we discover interesting tendencies that motivate futurework.
Anthology ID:
2020.lrec-1.54
Volume:
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2020
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
429–435
Language:
English
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.54
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Matthias Kraus, Fabian Fischbach, Pascal Jansen, and Wolfgang Minker. 2020. A Comparison of Explicit and Implicit Proactive Dialogue Strategies for Conversational Recommendation. In Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 429–435, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
A Comparison of Explicit and Implicit Proactive Dialogue Strategies for Conversational Recommendation (Kraus et al., LREC 2020)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-2/2020.lrec-1.54.pdf
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