Goal Awareness for Conversational AI : Proactivity, Non-collaborativity, and Beyond (2023)

Abstract: Conversational systems are envisioned to provide social support or functional service to human users via natural language interactions. Conventional conversation researches mainly focus on the responseability of the system, such as dialogue context understanding and response generation, but overlooks the design of an essential property in intelligent conversations, i.e., goal awareness. The awareness of goals means the state of not only being responsive to the users but also aware of the target conversational goal and capable of leading the conversation towards the goal, which is a significant step towards higher-level intelligence and artificial consciousness. It can not only largely improve user engagement and service efficiency in the conversation, but also empower the system to handle more complicated conversation tasks that involve strategical and motivational interactions. In this tutorial, we will introduce the recent advances on the design of agent’s awareness of goals in a wide range of conversational systems.

## introduction tutorial description conversational systems are envisioned to provide social support or functional service to human users via natural language interactions. conventional conversation researches mainly focus on the response-ability of the system, such as dialogue context understanding and response generation, but overlooks the design of an essential property in intelligent conversations, i.e., goal awareness. the awareness of goals means the state of not only being responsive to the users but also aware of the target conversational goal and capable of leading the conversation towards the goal, which is a significant step towards higher-level intelligence and artificial consciousness. it can not only largely improve user engagement and service efficiency in the conversation, but also empower the system to handle more complicated conversation tasks that involve strategical and motivational interactions. in this tutorial, we will introduce the recent advances on the design of agent's awareness of goals in a wide range of conversational systems. type of tutorial cutting-edge targeted audience target audiences are researchers and practitioners who interested in natural language processing and human-computer interaction. the audience will learn about the stateof-the-art research in conversational ai and the cutting-edge designs of agent's awareness in various conversational systems. ## other tutorial information breadth and diversity considerations according to the representative set of papers listed in the selected bibliography, the concerned work in this tutorial will contain only 10%-15% of work that involves at least one of the four presenters. the rest of the tutorial will present a comprehensive overview of the tutorial topic by discussing the related work as much as possible from other researchers. the discussed approaches are problemdriven and language-agnostic, which means that the introduced content are generally applicable to all languages. the techniques are also not limited to a certain type of dialogues and can be generalized to diverse conversational systems. we have a diverse background for the presenters across multiple institutions in different regions.