A Survey on the Recent Advancements in Human-Centered Dialog Systems
Roland Oruche, Sai Keerthana Goruganthu, Rithika Akula, Xiyao Cheng, MD Ashraful Goni, Bruce Wang Shibo, Kerk F. Kee, Marcos Zampieri, Prasad P. Calyam · ACM Computing Surveys · 2025
Dialog systems (e.g., chatbots) have been widely studied, yet related research that leverages artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) is constantly evolving. These systems have typically been developed to interact with humans in the form of speech, visual, or text conversation. As humans continue to adopt dialog systems for various objectives, there is a need to involve humans in every facet of the dialog development life cycle for synergistic augmentation of both the humans and the dialog system actors in real-world settings. We provide a holistic literature survey on the recent advancements in human-centered dialog systems (HCDS). Specifically, we provide background context surrounding the recent advancements in machine learning-based dialog systems and human-centered AI. We then bridge the gap between the two AI sub-fields and organize the research works on HCDS under three major categories (i.e., Human-Chatbot Collaboration, Human-Chatbot Alignment, Human-Centered Chatbot Design & Governance). In addition, we discuss the applicability and accessibility of the HCDS implementations through benchmark datasets, application scenarios, and downstream NLP tasks.