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Future directions for chatbot research: an interdisciplinary research agenda

Følstad, Asbjørn; Araujo, Theo; Law, Effie Lai-Chong; Brandtzaeg, Petter Bae; Papadopoulos, Symeon; Reis, Lea; Baez, Marcos; Laban, Guy; McAllister, Patrick; Ischen, Carolin; Wald, Rebecca; Catania, Fabio; Meyer von Wolff, Raphael; Hobert, Sebastian; Luger, Ewa

Future directions for chatbot research: an interdisciplinary research agenda Thumbnail


Authors

Asbjørn Følstad

Theo Araujo

Petter Bae Brandtzaeg

Symeon Papadopoulos

Lea Reis

Marcos Baez

Guy Laban

Patrick McAllister

Carolin Ischen

Rebecca Wald

Fabio Catania

Raphael Meyer von Wolff

Sebastian Hobert

Ewa Luger



Abstract

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.

Citation

Følstad, A., Araujo, T., Law, E. L., Brandtzaeg, P. B., Papadopoulos, S., Reis, L., …Luger, E. (2021). Future directions for chatbot research: an interdisciplinary research agenda. Computing, 103(12), 2915 - 2942. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00607-021-01016-7

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Sep 15, 2021
Online Publication Date Oct 19, 2021
Publication Date 2021-12
Deposit Date Jan 12, 2022
Publicly Available Date Jan 14, 2022
Journal Computing
Print ISSN 0010-485X
Electronic ISSN 1436-5057
Publisher Springer
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 103
Issue 12
Pages 2915 - 2942
DOI https://doi.org/10.1007/s00607-021-01016-7

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Advance online version This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.





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