TY - GEN
T1 - Informing the Design of a News Chatbot
AU - Zhang, Zhirun
AU - Zhang, Xinzhi
AU - Chen, Li
N1 - Funding Information:
We are thankful for all participants who joined this experiment. The work was supported by HKBU IRCMS/19-20/D05 and partially by RGC/HKBU12201620 and RGC/HKBU12602420.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 ACM.
PY - 2021/9/14
Y1 - 2021/9/14
N2 - Chatbots use conversational interfaces to simulate human communication and recently have been applied to different domains due to advancing techniques of natural language understanding and generation. In particular, in the domain of digital journalism, chatbots provide a new channel for audiences to engage with news. However, most chatbots operated by news organizations have so far failed to achieve business growth. In this paper, we have conducted a qualitative user study to better understand users' attitudes towards news chatbots. Specifically, 15 participants were asked to interact with several news chatbots implemented on Facebook Messenger by large international news organizations (e.g., ABC News, NBC News, and BBC News), by issuing a set of 22 sample questions covering various search and recommendation goals related to COVID-19. Then the participants expressed their expectations of news chatbots and the advantages/disadvantages perceived in using them. From these findings, we derive several design guidelines on effectiveness, informativeness, efficiency, humanization, and facility, suggesting developments to news chatbots that may better serve users' needs.
AB - Chatbots use conversational interfaces to simulate human communication and recently have been applied to different domains due to advancing techniques of natural language understanding and generation. In particular, in the domain of digital journalism, chatbots provide a new channel for audiences to engage with news. However, most chatbots operated by news organizations have so far failed to achieve business growth. In this paper, we have conducted a qualitative user study to better understand users' attitudes towards news chatbots. Specifically, 15 participants were asked to interact with several news chatbots implemented on Facebook Messenger by large international news organizations (e.g., ABC News, NBC News, and BBC News), by issuing a set of 22 sample questions covering various search and recommendation goals related to COVID-19. Then the participants expressed their expectations of news chatbots and the advantages/disadvantages perceived in using them. From these findings, we derive several design guidelines on effectiveness, informativeness, efficiency, humanization, and facility, suggesting developments to news chatbots that may better serve users' needs.
KW - conversational agents
KW - design guidelines
KW - News chatbots
KW - qualitative user study
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85115764638&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/3472306.3478358
DO - 10.1145/3472306.3478358
M3 - Conference proceeding
AN - SCOPUS:85115764638
T3 - Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents
SP - 224
EP - 231
BT - Proceedings of the 21st ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents, IVA 2021
PB - Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
T2 - 21st ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents, IVA 2021
Y2 - 14 September 2021 through 17 September 2021
ER -