SCAI

Check out recordings of all the sessions from SCAI'22 @ACMSIGIR here 👉youtube.com/playlist?list=… #sigir2022 #convsearch

The topics for the fourth year of the Conversational Assistance Track (CAsT) have been released: github.com/daltonj/trecca… New this year: (1) Different topic format, (2) Mixed-Initiative system responses (3) Complex discourse structures @JeffD @JTrippas @maliannejadi @leifos

Check out the first session of @scai_workshop 2022: "Conversational Search Evaluation", where I present a way to evaluate conversational systems by user simulator that predicts users' satisfaction scores along with actions and utterances 🤖🤖 Joint work with @AldoLipani

Excited to announce that I've been promoted to Associate Professor (Senior Lecturer) at @GlasgowCS. My group, @grill_lab_ai has open positions for PhD/Postdocs on interactive and multimodal foundation models -- grilllab.ai #conversationalai

📢 3 new research-focused faculty positions @HeriotWattUni computer science. We're looking to strengthen our team in #NLProc and #ConversationalAI. DM me if interested

🥁🥁🥁 @IgluContest is about to start! The focus is on building an interactive agent that can understand the instructions in natural language to build structures in the #Minecraft environment! In case of uncertainty, ask clarifying questions! Interested? #SIGIR2022 #NAACL2022

user studies of a system prototype that suggests objects or aspects to clarify ambiguous comparative questions @albondarenko2 @scai_workshop #sigir2022 #convsearch webis.de/downloads/publ…

user simulator for answering clarification questions evaluation: automated NLG & document retrieval metrics, human annotations of naturalness & usefulness @puding_p @scai_workshop #sigir2022 #convsearch arxiv.org/abs/2204.08046

risk-aware policy trained with RL deep q-learning decides to ask a clarifying question based on a user simulator response & future results session-based evaluation metrics: recall, MRR, decision error rate @Zhenduo_W @scai_workshop #sigir2022 #convsearch arxiv.org/pdf/2101.06327…

limitations of user simulators for conversational search? @JeffD * lack of multi-turn data with natural long-term trajectories * personalisation, cultural & language variations * need for taxonomy & understanding of different system initiative actions @scai_workshop #sigir2022

@AldoLipani chairing Conversational QA session at @scai_workshop

This was my first debut to the @scai_workshop 😊 Thanks for the invitation and valuable questions and discussion!

mixed-initiative interaction in collaborative conversational search wizard-of-oz study measuring dialog utility, workload, communication, perceived benefits & challenges @lolthyself @scai_workshop #sigir2022 #convsearch arxiv.org/abs/2202.09728

In the perspectives session, I enjoyed the talk by @krisztianbalog on on natural language user profiles for recommendation, especially how they used a few-shot prompt template to turn a large language model (LaMDA) into a recommender. dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/34…

Valeriia Bolotova et al. got the best paper award at #SIGIR2022 for their very extensive paper titled "A Non-Factoid Question-Answering Taxonomy", which I really like because it is such a timeless topic and remains relevant dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/34…

🤵‍♂️I can see myself in the corner :-) Jokes aside it was a wonderful session. Thanks @scai_workshop and @SIGIRConf for the opportunity, my fellow presenters, session chair, and all the audience for the wonderful discussion at the end of the session. #SCAI #SIGIR2022

Chairing the mixed initiative session at @scai_workshop. Sandeep (@lolthyself) from Amazon presenting The Effects of System Initiative during Conversational Collaborative Search arxiv.org/abs/2202.09728… #SIGIR2022 #scai2022

main challenges for conversational QA? @AldoLipani * difficulties in evaluation: * lack of metrics for answer naturalness & facet discovery * need to measure user satisfaction * incorporating personalised context * leveraging non-parametric information sources

GRILLBot winner of 2022 Alexa Prize Challenge: cooking & DIY assistant TaskGraph representation: branching for interaction & ingredient requirements LLM prompts for contextual QA & question taxonomy @carlos_gemmell #sigir2022 shorturl.at/iOU04 github.com/grill-lab/OAT

fine-tuned REL on AMT annotations of concepts and entities in conversations helpful to answer follow-up questions @hideaki_joko #sigir2022 #convsearch arxiv.org/abs/2105.04903 github.com/informagi/conv… github.com/informagi/conv…