Abstract: Conversational interaction systems such as Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, Apple Siri, and Microsoft Cortana have become very popular over the recent years. Such systems have allowed users to interact with a wide variety of content on the web through a conversational interface. Research challenges such as the Dialogue System Technology Challenges, Dialogue Dodecathlon, Amazon Alexa Prize and the Vision and Language Navigation task have continued to inspire research in conversational AI. These challenges have brought together researchers from different communities such as speech recognition, spoken language understanding, reinforcement learning, language generation, and multi-modal question answering.
Unlike other popular NLP tasks, dialogue frequently has humans in the loop, whether it is for evaluation, active learning or online reward estimation. Through this workshop we aim to bring together researchers from academia and industry to discuss the challenges and opportunities in such human in the loop setups. We hope that this sparks interesting discussions about conversational agents, interactive systems, and how we can use humans most effectively when building such setups. We will highlight areas such as human evaluation setups, reliability in human evaluation, human in the loop training, interactive learning and user modeling. We also highly encourage non-English based dialogue systems in these areas.
The one-day workshop will include talks from senior technical leaders and researchers to share insights associated with evaluating dialogue systems. We also plan on having oral presentations and poster sessions on works related to the topic of the workshop. Finally we will end the workshop with an interactive panel of speakers. As an outcome we expect the participants from the NeurIPS community to walk away with better understanding of human in the loop dialogue modeling as well as key areas of research in this field. Additionally we would like to see discussions around the unification of human evaluation setups in some way.