Proactive Systems and Influenceable Users: Simulating Proactivity in Task-oriented Dialogues

We investigate proactivity, the capacity of a dialogue system to provide relevant information even when not explicitly requested, in the context of task-oriented dialogues. We propose to extend the current task-oriented framework, and have investigated four aspects of proactivity: (i) the degree of proactivity provided by the system during a dialogue; (ii) the propensity of the user to be influenced by the system proactivity; (iii) the complexity of the domain ontology; (iv) the relation between user needs and application domain, in terms of expected failure situations. Under the hypothesis that proactivity helps to increase effectiveness and efficiency of dialogues, we set up a framework based on dialogue simulations, and experimented the four aspects mentioned above. Although the current implementation allows to simulate a limited amount of dialogue phenomena (e.g., system initiative only), we are able to show that proactivity might have strong effects on dialogues, reducing up to 60% of dialogue turns in an application domain of medium complexity.