“CommunityBots: Creating and Evaluating A Multi-Agent Chatbot Platform for Public Input Elicitation” was accepted to CSCW 2023
Authors: Zhiqiu Jiang, Mashrur Rashik, Kunjal Panchal, Mahmood Jasim, Ali Sarvghad, Pari Riahi, Erica DeWitt, Fey Thurber, Narges Mahyar.
![](https://groups.cs.umass.edu/hci-vis/wp-content/uploads/sites/33/2022/11/Screenshot-from-2022-11-29-18-23-17-1024x448.png)
System Overview
This figure presents CommunityBots’ system overview. We use an example to guide through the process of user interactions with multiple chatbots: 1) The Household chatbot asks the user questions about their family life; 2) The user responds that they want to skip the current topic; 3) The Household chatbot receives user’s response “Skip this topic”; 4) The Household chatbot forwards the user’s response to Juji’s NLU module; 5a) Juji uses NLU to identify the user’s engagement level; 5b) NLU determines that the user doesn’t want to talk about the current topic and passes this conclusion to CommunityBot’s Topic-Switch Mechanism; 6) Topic-Switch Mechanism determines which topic to change the conversation to; 7) Since there are no remaining topics for the Household chatbot to converse, the Topic-Switch Mechanism asks the Chatbot-switch mechanism to switch from the Household chatbot to the next chatbot in queue; 8) Chatbot-switch mechanism determines that the next chatbot to converse with the user is the Work chatbot; 9) Juji notifies the Chatbot-switch mechanism about the Work chatbot invocations; 10) The Chatbot-switch mechanism fetches the questions related to the Work chatbot; 11a) The Chatbot-switch mechanism “wakes up” the Work chatbot on user’s screen and passes the next question to be asked; 11b) At the same time, the Chatbot-switch Mechanism puts the Household chatbot in a inactive state; 12) The question asked by the Work chatbot is displayed on user’s screen; 13) The user proceeds to talk to the new chatbot.
You can find the paper here.