About this Research Topic
Conversational Natural Language Interfaces (CNLIs) provide an easy means to bridge between users and complex systems, enabling users to interact with technology in a more natural and user friendly manner. The last decade has seen the revival of CNLIs, from spoken dialogue systems to virtual assistants that are capable of gathering information from multiple knowledge sources and rendering such information via simple human-like interfaces. They allow users to converse in spoken, written or multimodal natural language. As a result, CNLIs are now becoming ubiquitous both in consumer settings such as, Alexa, Google Home or Siri, as well as enterprise settings with customer service chatbots. The recent progress in large language models such as chatGPT from OpenAI, LLaMa from Meta, PaLM2 from Google, Bedrock from Amazon, has paved ways to accelerate the development of numerous CNLIs.
This Research Topic aims to create an interdisciplinary platform for researchers and practitioners working on diverse research domains such as, Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning and Human Computer Interaction, both from industry and academia, to discuss challenges in existing CNLIs, propose innovative techniques and methodologies to advance the state of the art and provide future directions in this rapidly growing field. As CNLIs become increasingly integrated into healthcare, education, e-commerce, and many more practical fields, this collection also considers the broader ethical, social and cultural ramifications of these systems.
This Research Topic invites papers on the following topics:
1. Conversational Agents
- Question and Answering
- Summarization
- Learning and Inference on large knowledge graphs, tables and other structured knowledge sources
2. Dialogue Management Systems
3. User Experience, Usability Testing and Evaluation Metrics for CNLIs
4. Personalization and Adaptivity in Conversational Systems
5. Multimodal Interaction in Conversational Interfaces
6. Ethical and Societal Implications of CNLIs
7. Applications of CNLIs, including but not limited to healthcare, education and e-commerce
This Research Topic aims to create an interdisciplinary platform for researchers and practitioners working on diverse research domains such as, Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning and Human Computer Interaction, both from industry and academia, to discuss challenges in existing CNLIs, propose innovative techniques and methodologies to advance the state of the art and provide future directions in this rapidly growing field. As CNLIs become increasingly integrated into healthcare, education, e-commerce, and many more practical fields, this collection also considers the broader ethical, social and cultural ramifications of these systems.
This Research Topic invites papers on the following topics:
1. Conversational Agents
- Question and Answering
- Summarization
- Learning and Inference on large knowledge graphs, tables and other structured knowledge sources
2. Dialogue Management Systems
3. User Experience, Usability Testing and Evaluation Metrics for CNLIs
4. Personalization and Adaptivity in Conversational Systems
5. Multimodal Interaction in Conversational Interfaces
6. Ethical and Societal Implications of CNLIs
7. Applications of CNLIs, including but not limited to healthcare, education and e-commerce
Keywords: Conversational Natural Language Interfaces, dialogue systems, large language models, Natural Language Processing
Important Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.
