A Pilot Study for Understanding Users’ Attitudes Towards a Conversational Agent for News Recommendation

Li Chen, Zhirun Zhang, Xinzhi Zhang, Lehong Zhao

Research output: Chapter in book/report/conference proceedingConference proceedingpeer-review

2 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Conversational recommender agents have been rapidly developed and applied in various domains (e.g., amusement, e-commerce, tourism) in recent years, to allow users to easily access information or service through natural communication with the system. However, little attention has been paid to the news domain, though some news organizations (e.g., ABC, BBC) have started to deploy news chatbots to engage with audiences. In this work, we performed a pilot study in form of a semi-structured interview for the purpose of knowing important features of recommendations users expect when they interact with a news conversational agent. In particular, in order to acquire users’ thoughtful feedback, we implemented a prototype system based on a taxonomy that covers all of the major recommendation-seeking and information-searching goals according to related literature. The interview results reveal users’ opinions on various aspects of a conversational agent for news recommendation, including the condition under which they may request/accept the news recommendation by a conversational agent, important features of the conversational news recommendation they expect, and their preferred preference elicitation strategy. Several practical implications are concluded at the end, which might inspire the design and development of effective conversational agents in the news domain.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationCUI 2022: Proceedings of the 4th Conference on Conversational User Interfaces
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Pages1–6
Number of pages6
ISBN (Print)9781450397391
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 26 Jul 2022
Event2022 Conversational User Interfaces - Glasgow, UK, Glasgow, United Kingdom
Duration: 26 Jul 202228 Jul 2022
https://www.conversationaluserinterfaces.org/2022/

Publication series

NameProceedings of the Conference on Conversational User Interfaces

Conference

Conference2022 Conversational User Interfaces
Abbreviated titleCUI 2022
Country/TerritoryUnited Kingdom
CityGlasgow
Period26/07/2228/07/22
Internet address

User-Defined Keywords

  • Conversational recommender agents
  • news chatbots
  • interview study
  • qualitative results

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