Leveraging Interesting Facts to Enhance User Engagement with Conversational Interfaces

Nikhita Vedula, Giuseppe Castellucci, Eugene Agichtein, Oleg Rokhlenko, Shervin Malmasi

Abstract
Conversational Task Assistants (CTAs) guide users in performing a multitude of activities, such as making recipes. However, ensuring that interactions remain engaging, interesting, and enjoyable for CTA users is not trivial, especially for time-consuming or challenging tasks. Grounded in psychological theories of human interest, we propose to engage users with contextual and interesting statements or facts during interactions with a multi-modal CTA, to reduce fatigue and task abandonment before a task is complete. To operationalize this idea, we train a high-performing classifier (82% F1-score) to automatically identify relevant and interesting facts for users. We use it to create an annotated dataset of task-specific interesting facts for the domain of cooking. Finally, we design and validate a dialogue policy to incorporate the identified relevant and interesting facts into a conversation, to improve user engagement and task completion. Live testing on a leading multi-modal voice assistant shows that 66% of the presented facts were received positively, leading to a 40% gain in the user satisfaction rating, and a 37% increase in conversation length. These findings emphasize that strategically incorporating interesting facts into the CTA experience can promote real-world user participation for guided task interactions.
Anthology ID:
2024.naacl-industry.38
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 6: Industry Track)
Month:
June
Year:
2024
Address:
Mexico City, Mexico
Editors:
Yi Yang, Aida Davani, Avi Sil, Anoop Kumar
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
437–446
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-industry.38
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.naacl-industry.38
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Nikhita Vedula, Giuseppe Castellucci, Eugene Agichtein, Oleg Rokhlenko, and Shervin Malmasi. 2024. Leveraging Interesting Facts to Enhance User Engagement with Conversational Interfaces. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 6: Industry Track), pages 437–446, Mexico City, Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Leveraging Interesting Facts to Enhance User Engagement with Conversational Interfaces (Vedula et al., NAACL 2024)
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