Our paper “Exploring User Engagement Through an Interaction Lens: What Textual Cues Can Tell Us about Human-Chatbot Interactions” is accepted to be published in the proceedings of the 6th iteration of the ACM conference on Conversational User Interfaces (CUI). The publication also gained a spot in the conference for a paper presentation, which is going to take place between 8-10 July 2024.
The paper presentation on the conference website: https://programs.sigchi.org/cui/2024/program/content/166851
Read the paper at https://doi.org/10.1145/3640794.3665536
Title
Exploring User Engagement Through an Interaction Lens: What Textual Cues Can Tell Us about Human-Chatbot Interactions
Abstract
Monitoring and maintaining user engagement in human-chatbot interactions is challenging. Researchers often use cues observed in the interactions as indicators to infer engagement. However, evaluation of these cues is lacking. In this study, we collected an inventory of potential textual engagements cues from the literature, including linguistic features, utterance features, and interaction features. These cues were subsequently used to annotate a dataset of 291 user-chatbot interactions, and we examined which of these cues predicted self-reported user engagement. Our results show that engagement can indeed be recognized at the level of individual utterances. Notably, words indicating cognitive thinking processes and motivational utterances were strong indicators of engagement. An overall negative tone could also predict engagement, highlighting the importance of nuanced interpretation and contextual awareness of user utterances. Our findings demonstrated initial feasibility of recognizing utterance-level cues and using them to infer user engagement, although further validation is needed across different content-domains.
Reference
He, L., Braggar, A., Basar, E., Krahmer, E., Antheunis, M., & Bosse, T. (2024). Exploring User Engagement Through an Interaction Lens: What Textual Cues Can Tell Us about Human-Chatbot Interactions. In Proceedings of the 6th Conference on Conversational User Interfaces (CUI’24). ACM.