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

在过去的十年中，许多智能代理，如Alexa和SIRI，已经成为普通消费的产品。公众张开双臂欢迎他们。公共使用为研究智能代理和对话的研究社区带来了有趣和新颖的挑战。一方面，接受这些代理让研究，以推动其边界，许多新的应用程序的挑战，与真实的用户的互动，以及如何代理执行会计。另一方面，为了保持这一黄金机会，必须满足用户的期望。目前，对智能代理的大部分研究都集中在代理本身：赋予它类似人类的品质，并集中在先进的统计方法来决定代理应该说什么。虽然这已经产生了很多有趣的工作，但它没有考虑到用户：用户对代理的性能有何感受，代理是否对用户有用，代理的可靠性如何。用户研讨会的目标是确定对话和智能代理的未来研究的挑战，这将推动研究人员把他们的研究重点从代理到用户。为了实现这一目标，用户研讨会将聚集来自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“我如何帮助你？“我帮过你吗？”". 智能代理目前的研究集中在代理和它的行动的表征，很少有用户的特点：用户的评估系统的性能，真实的用户数据，用户的行为，和用户的需求在对话过程中的演变。将代理定位为服务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，商用代理，对话评估，数据集，夹带和适应，伦理学。用户研讨会的目标是提供一个指导方针，为未来的研究在对话和智能代理的焦点转向用户。它将探讨目前的艺术状态，并设想未来的智能代理和对话的研究路径。具体而言，它将定义大型合作项目和社区范围内的挑战。它还将确定研究的优先事项和研究资金投入的最佳方向。讲习班将编写一份报告，综合所有与会者的投入和讲习班的结论，供资机构用来确定这一领域今后的研究方向。它将集中于用户导向的研究问题，并给出成功的过去的工作和几个具体的未来研究方向的例子。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识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.