=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-3318/invited4
|storemode=property
|title=Towards Mixed-Initiative Conversational
Information Seeking
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3318/invited4.pdf
|volume=Vol-3318
|authors=Hamed Zamani
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/cikm/Zamani22
}}
==Towards Mixed-Initiative Conversational
Information Seeking==
<pdf width="1500px">https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3318/invited4.pdf</pdf>
<pre>
Towards Mixed-Initiative Conversational
Information Seeking
Hamed Zamani
Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval,
Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences,
University of Massachusetts Amherst,
United States


                                      Abstract
                                      While conversational information seeking has roots in early information retrieval research, recent
                                      advances in automatic speech recognition and conversational agents as well as popularity of devices
                                      with limited bandwidth interfaces have led to increasing interest in this area. An ideal conversational
                                      information seeking system requires to go beyond the typical “query-response” paradigm by supporting
                                      mixed-initiative interactions. In this talk, I will review the recent efforts on developing mixed-initiative
                                      conversational information seeking systems and draw connections with early work on interactive
                                      information retrieval. I will describe methods for generating and evaluating clarifying questions in
                                      response to information seeking requests. I will further highlight the connections between conversational
                                      search and recommendation, and finish with a discussion on the next steps that require significant
                                      progress in the context of mixed-initiative conversational information seeking.

                                      Keywords
                                      Dialogue systems, conversational search, interactive information retrieval, pro-active conversations




Biography
Hamed Zamani is an Assistant Professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass),
where he also serves as the Associate Director of the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval
(CIIR). Prior to UMass, he was a Researcher at Microsoft. He received his Ph.D. from UMass
under supervision of W. Bruce Croft and achieved the Outstanding Dissertation Award. He is
an active member of the IR community and published over 80 peer-reviewed articles. He is
known for his work on neural information retrieval and conversational information seeking.
He is a recipient of NSF CAREER Award in 2022 for Conversational IR research. His group was
also selected for the Alexa Prize Challenge 2021. He has co-organized multiple workshops at
SIGIR, WSDM, and RecSys conferences and has served as Senior Program Committee members
at major IR conferences, such as SIGIR, WSDM, CIKM, and WWW. He is currently serving as
an Associate Editor for ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS).


First Workshop on Proactive and Agent-Supported Information Retrieval (PASIR’22) organized as part of CIKM 2022, Oct
21, 2022, Atlanta, USA.
Envelope-Open zamani@cs.umass.edu (H. Zamani)
GLOBE https://groups.cs.umass.edu/zamani/ (H. Zamani)
Orcid 0000-0002-0800-3340 (H. Zamani)
                                    © 2022 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
 CEUR
 Workshop
 Proceedings
               http://ceur-ws.org
               ISSN 1613-0073
                                    CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org)

</pre>