DECI: A Tutorial on Designing Effective Conversational Interfaces

Conversational User Interfaces (CUIs) have been argued to have advantages over traditional GUIs due to having a more human-like interaction. The growing popularity of conversational agents has enabled humans to interact with machines more naturally. There is an increasing familiarity among people with conversational interactions mediated by...

Supporting mental health self-care discovery through a chatbot

Good mental health is imperative for one’s wellbeing. While clinical mental disorder treatments exist, self-care is an essential aspect of mental health. This paper explores the use and perceived trust of conversational agents, chatbots, in the context of crowdsourced self-care through a between-subjects study (N = 80). One group used a...

Editorial: User Modeling and Recommendations

To Trust or Not To Trust: How a Conversational Interface Affects Trust in a Decision Support System

Trust is an important component of human-AI relationships and plays a major role in shaping the reliance of users on online algorithmic decision support systems. With recent advances in natural language processing, text and voice-based conversational interfaces have provided users with new ways of interacting with such systems. Despite the...

How do user opinions influence their interaction with web search results?

Understanding the influence of users' opinions on their search behavior together with their inherent biases in web search has garnered widespread interest in recent times. This is largely due to the implications of promoting critical thinking, explaining phenomena such as political polarization, or the manifestation of echo chambers. It is...

This Is Not What We Ordered: Exploring Why Biased Search Result Rankings Affect User Attitudes on Debated Topics

In web search on debated topics, algorithmic and cognitive biases strongly influence how users consume and process information. Recent research has shown that this can lead to a search engine manipulation effect (SEME): when search result rankings are biased towards a particular viewpoint, users tend to adopt this favored viewpoint. To better...

Remote Work Aided by Conversational Agents

Due to the coronavirus pandemic, remote work from home has rapidly become a necessity around the world, drastically changing the potential landscape for the future of work. Over the last couple of decades, microtask crowdsourcing has emerged as a viable means of carrying out remote online work to earn one’s living — an alternative to traditional...

Improving Worker Engagement Through Conversational Microtask Crowdsourcing

The rise in popularity of conversational agents has enabled humans to interact with machines more naturally. Recent work has shown that crowd workers in microtask marketplaces can complete a variety of human intelligence tasks (HITs) using conversational interfaces with similar output quality compared to the traditional Web interfaces. In...

Estimating Conversational Styles in Conversational Microtask Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing marketplaces have provided a large number of opportunities for online workers to earn a living. To improve satisfaction and engagement of such workers, who are vital for the sustainability of the marketplaces, recent works have used conversational interfaces to support the execution of a variety of crowdsourcing tasks. The...

How Does Team Composition Affect Knowledge Gain of Users in Collaborative Web Search?

Studies in searching as learning (SAL) have revealed that user knowledge gain not only manifests over a long-term learning period, but also occurs in single short-term web search sessions. Though prior works have shown that the knowledge gain of collaborators can be influenced by user demographics and searching strategies in long-term...

TaskGenie: Crowd-Powered Task Generation for Struggling Search

Search tasks provide a medium for the evaluation of system performance and the underlying analytical aspects of IR systems. Researchers have recently developed new interfaces or mechanisms to support vague information needs and struggling search. However, little attention has been paid to the generation of a unified task set for evaluation...