Human-Aided Bots

A chatbot is an example of a text-based conversational agent. While natural language understanding and machine learning techniques have advanced rapidly, current fully automated chatbots still struggle to serve their users well. Human intelligence, brought by crowd workers, freelancers, or even full-time employees can be embodied in the chatbot logic to fill the gaps caused by limitations of fully automated solutions. In this paper, we investigate human-aided bots, i.e., bots (including chatbots) using humans in the loop to operate. We survey industrial and academic examples of human-aided bots, discuss their differences and common patterns, and identify open research questions.