TY - JOUR
T1 - Future directions for chatbot research
T2 - An interdisciplinary research agenda
AU - Følstad, Asbjørn
AU - Araujo, Theo
AU - Law, Effie Lai-Chong
AU - Brandtzaeg, Petter Bae
AU - Papadopoulos, Symeon
AU - Reis, Lea
AU - Baez, Marcos
AU - Laban, Guy
AU - McAllister, Patrick
AU - Ischen, Carolin
AU - Wald, Rebecca
AU - Catania, Fabio
AU - Meyer von Wolff, Raphael
AU - Hobert, Sebastian
AU - Luger, Ewa
N1 - Funding Information:
Open access funding provided by SINTEF AS. Funding supporting the work conducted by the first author was provided by Norges Forskningsråd (Grant No. 270940).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021, The Author(s).
PY - 2021/12
Y1 - 2021/12
N2 - Chatbots are increasingly becoming important gateways to digital services and information—taken up within domains such as customer service, health, education, and work support. However, there is only limited knowledge concerning the impact of chatbots at the individual, group, and societal level. Furthermore, a number of challenges remain to be resolved before the potential of chatbots can be fully realized. In response, chatbots have emerged as a substantial research area in recent years. To help advance knowledge in this emerging research area, we propose a research agenda in the form of future directions and challenges to be addressed by chatbot research. This proposal consolidates years of discussions at the CONVERSATIONS workshop series on chatbot research. Following a deliberative research analysis process among the workshop participants, we explore future directions within six topics of interest: (a) users and implications, (b) user experience and design, (c) frameworks and platforms, (d) chatbots for collaboration, (e) democratizing chatbots, and (f) ethics and privacy. For each of these topics, we provide a brief overview of the state of the art, discuss key research challenges, and suggest promising directions for future research. The six topics are detailed with a 5-year perspective in mind and are to be considered items of an interdisciplinary research agenda produced collaboratively by avid researchers in the field.
AB - Chatbots are increasingly becoming important gateways to digital services and information—taken up within domains such as customer service, health, education, and work support. However, there is only limited knowledge concerning the impact of chatbots at the individual, group, and societal level. Furthermore, a number of challenges remain to be resolved before the potential of chatbots can be fully realized. In response, chatbots have emerged as a substantial research area in recent years. To help advance knowledge in this emerging research area, we propose a research agenda in the form of future directions and challenges to be addressed by chatbot research. This proposal consolidates years of discussions at the CONVERSATIONS workshop series on chatbot research. Following a deliberative research analysis process among the workshop participants, we explore future directions within six topics of interest: (a) users and implications, (b) user experience and design, (c) frameworks and platforms, (d) chatbots for collaboration, (e) democratizing chatbots, and (f) ethics and privacy. For each of these topics, we provide a brief overview of the state of the art, discuss key research challenges, and suggest promising directions for future research. The six topics are detailed with a 5-year perspective in mind and are to be considered items of an interdisciplinary research agenda produced collaboratively by avid researchers in the field.
KW - chatbots
KW - conversational agents
KW - dialogue systems
KW - future research directions
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85117326888&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/s00607-021-01016-7
DO - 10.1007/s00607-021-01016-7
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85117326888
SN - 0010-485X
VL - 103
SP - 2915
EP - 2942
JO - Computing
JF - Computing
IS - 12
ER -