A Survey on Proactive Dialogue Systems: Problems, Methods, and Prospects

TL;DR

This survey reviews the state-of-the-art in proactive dialogue systems, highlighting key problems, design strategies, and future challenges to advance conversational AI capabilities.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of proactive dialogue system problems, methods, and future research directions, filling a gap in current literature.

Findings

Identifies core challenges in proactive dialogue design

Summarizes advanced techniques for system proactivity

Discusses future research directions and open problems

Abstract

Proactive dialogue systems, related to a wide range of real-world conversational applications, equip the conversational agent with the capability of leading the conversation direction towards achieving pre-defined targets or fulfilling certain goals from the system side. It is empowered by advanced techniques to progress to more complicated tasks that require strategical and motivational interactions. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive overview of the prominent problems and advanced designs for conversational agent's proactivity in different types of dialogues. Furthermore, we discuss challenges that meet the real-world application needs but require a greater research focus in the future. We hope that this first survey of proactive dialogue systems can provide the community with a quick access and an overall picture to this practical problem, and stimulate more progresses on conversational AI to the next level.