WORKSHOP: Toward User-Oriented Agents: Research Directions and Challenges

在过去十年里，Alexa和Siri等许多智能代理作为普通消费产品出现。公众张开双臂欢迎他们。公共使用给致力于智能代理和对话的研究界带来了有趣和新颖的挑战。一方面，对这些代理的接受让研究突破了它的边界，受到许多新应用程序、与真实用户的交互以及对代理执行情况的统计的挑战。另一方面，为了保持这一千载难逢的机会，必须满足用户的期望。目前，智能智能体的研究大多集中在智能体本身：赋予智能体类似人类的性质，并集中在先进的统计方法来决定智能体应该说什么。虽然这产生了许多有趣的工作，但它没有考虑到用户：用户对代理的性能有什么感觉，代理对用户是否有用，代理的可靠性有多高。用户研讨会的目标是确定对话和智能代理未来研究面临的挑战，这将推动研究人员将他们的研究重点从代理转向用户。为了实现这一目标，用户研讨会将汇集与智能代理和对话相关领域的专家，讨论他们的研究如何更好地面向用户，从“我能为您做些什么？”变成“我帮过你了吗？”目前对智能代理的研究集中在代理及其行为的表征上，而很少描述用户：用户对系统性能的评估、真实的用户数据、用户的行为以及对话过程中用户需求的演变。将代理定位为服务于用户涉及人工智能中许多领域的专业知识，例如：高级对话系统、商业代理、对话评估、数据集、夹带和适应、伦理学。用户研讨会的目标是为未来对话和智能代理的研究提供指导方针，因为重点转向用户。它将探索目前的技术现状，并展望未来智能代理和对话的研究路径。具体地说，它将定义大型协作项目和社区范围的挑战。它还将确定研究的优先事项和投资研究资金的最佳方向。研讨会将编写一份报告，综合所有与会者的意见和研讨会的结论，供供资机构用来确定这一领域未来的研究方向。它将集中于以用户为导向的研究问题，并提供过去成功工作的例子和几个具体的未来研究方向。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的学术价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Many intelligent agents such as Alexa and SIRI have appeared as products for general consumption in the past decade. The public has welcomed them with open arms. Public use has brought interesting and novel challenges for the research community that works on intelligent agents and dialog. On the one hand, the acceptance of these agents lets research to push its boundaries, challenged by many new applications, interactions with real users, and accounting of how well the agent performs. On the other hand, in order to maintain this golden opportunity, the users' expectations must be met. At present much of the research on intelligent agents has centered on the agent itself: giving it human-like qualities and concentrating on advanced statistical methods to decide what the agent should say. While this has produced much interesting work, it has not taken the user into account: how the user feels about the agent's performance, whether the agent was useful to the user, how reliable the agent has been. The goal of the USER workshop is to identify the challenges for future research in dialog and intelligent agents that will push researchers to turn the focus of their research from the agent to the user. To achieve this goal, the USER workshop will gather experts from fields related to intelligent agents and dialog for a discussion of how their research can be better directed toward the user, going from "how may I help you?" to "have I helped you?". Present research into intelligent agents concentrates on the characterization of the agent and its actions and rarely characterizes the user: the user's assessment of system performance, real user data, the behavior of the user, and the evolution of the user's needs during the course of a dialog. Orienting an agent to serve the user touches on expertise in many domains within Artificial Intelligence such as: advanced dialog systems, commercially available agents, dialog assessment, datasets, entrainment and adaptation, ethics. The goal of the USER workshop is to provide a guideline for future research in dialog and intelligent agents as focus turns to the user. It will explore the present state of the art and envisage the research path of the future on intelligent agents and dialog. Specifically, it will define large scale collaborative projects and community-wide challenges. It will also identify priorities in research and the best directions in which to invest research funding. The workshop will produce a report that integrates input from all participants and conclusions from the workshop, which can be used by funding agencies to shape the future direction of research in this area. It will concentrate on the issue of user-directed research and give examples of successful past work and several concrete future research directions. It will reflect the opinions of a community of researchers.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.