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Talk on "Examining the Potential for Enhancing User Search Experience using Conversational Agent Support" by Prof. Gareth J. F. Jones, Dublin City University, Ireland

We are very pleased to announce the talk on "Examining the Potential for Enhancing User Search Experience using Conversational Agent Support" by Prof. Gareth J. F. Jones, Dublin City University, Ireland as followings

Title:

Examining the Potential for Enhancing User Search Experience using Conversational Agent Support

Abstract:

Information retrieval (IR) systems are designed to satisfy a user's information need by returning items potentially relevant to this need in response to a user query. When using a traditional IR, the user works unassisted to attempt to create an effective "single shot" search query suitable for retrieving relevant items in a single retrieval action. In order to locate relevant information the user is required to engage with the content of the retrieved items. In practice, the information deficit underlying their information need means that users often encounter difficulties in specifying such effective queries, and engaging with retrieved content to locate relevant information can be time consuming and inefficient. These challenges have motivated a growing interest in conversational information retrieval (CIR) in which the user's search activities are supported by a conversational agent. Rather than a single shot retrieval pass, retrieval can become a conversational process in which this agent can potentially assist the user in construction of effective queries and guide their navigation of retrieved content. This presentation will describe our recent work examining and contrasting user engagement with a conversational search interface and an equivalent traditional search interface without the conversational functionality. In this system, the conversational agent takes the role of an assist working alongside the searcher. Results indicate considerable potential for effective conversational support for search interaction with high levels of user acceptance and reduced cognitive load while maintaining search effectiveness.

Speaker Bio:

Prof. Gareth J. F. Jones, Dublin City University, Ireland

Gareth J.F. Jones is a Professor in the School of Computing and a Principal Investigator in the ADAPT Centre at Dublin City University (Ireland). His research focuses on topics in information retrieval and search, including multimedia, multilingual and interactive applications. Professor Jones has published more than 500 research papers, and has received a number of Best Paper Awards. He was General Co-Chair for ACM SIGIR 2013 and CLEF 2017 and of Interspeech 2023, He was co-founder of the MediaEval multimedia evaluation benchmark, and has contributed to the organization of a number of tasks at the NTCIR, CLEF, TREC and TRECVid benchmarks. He was previously a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge (UK) where he worked on one of the first projects in spoken content retrieval. He held a Toshiba Fellowship at the Toshiba Research and Development Center in Kawasaki (Japan), and was a Lecturer at the University of Exeter (UK). He holds Ph.D. and B.Eng. degrees from the University of Bristol (UK).