The Wizard of Curiosities: Enriching Dialogues with Fun Facts

Frederico Vicente, Rafael Ferreira, David Semedo, Joao Magalhaes


Abstract
Introducing curiosities in a conversation is a way to teach something new to the person in a pleasant and enjoyable way. Enriching dialogues with contextualized curiosities can improve the users’ perception of a dialog system and their overall user experience. In this paper, we introduce a set of curated curiosities, targeting dialogues in the cooking and DIY domains. In particular, we use real human-agent conversations collected in the context of the Amazon Alexa TaskBot challenge, a multimodal and multi-turn conversational setting. According to an A/B test with over 1000 conversations, curiosities not only increase user engagement, but provide an average relative rating improvement of 9.7%.
Anthology ID:
2023.sigdial-1.13
Volume:
Proceedings of the 24th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue
Month:
September
Year:
2023
Address:
Prague, Czechia
Editors:
Svetlana Stoyanchev, Shafiq Joty, David Schlangen, Ondrej Dusek, Casey Kennington, Malihe Alikhani
Venue:
SIGDIAL
SIG:
SIGDIAL
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
149–155
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.sigdial-1.13
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.sigdial-1.13
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Frederico Vicente, Rafael Ferreira, David Semedo, and Joao Magalhaes. 2023. The Wizard of Curiosities: Enriching Dialogues with Fun Facts. In Proceedings of the 24th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, pages 149–155, Prague, Czechia. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
The Wizard of Curiosities: Enriching Dialogues with Fun Facts (Vicente et al., SIGDIAL 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-5/2023.sigdial-1.13.pdf