Recent research on proactive conversational agents (PCAs) mainly focuses on improving the system's capabilities in anticipating and planning action sequences to accomplish tasks and achieve goals before users articulate their requests. This perspectives paper highlights the importance of moving towards building human-centered PCAs that emphasize human needs and expectations, and that considers ethical and social implications of these agents, rather than solely focusing on technological capabilities. The distinction between a proactive and a reactive system lies in the proactive system's initiative-taking nature. Without thoughtful design, proactive systems risk being perceived as intrusive by human users. We address the issue by establishing a new taxonomy concerning three key dimensions of human-centered PCAs, namely Intelligence, Adaptivity, and Civility. We discuss potential research opportunities and challenges based on this new taxonomy upon the five stages of PCA system construction. This perspectives paper lays a foundation for the emerging area of conversational information retrieval research and paves the way towards advancing human-centered proactive conversational systems.

翻译：近期关于主动对话智能体的研究主要聚焦于提升系统在用户表达需求前预测并规划行动序列以完成任务和实现目标的能力。本观点论文强调，构建人本化的主动对话智能体应重视人类需求与期望，并考虑其伦理与社会影响，而非仅专注于技术能力的提升。主动系统与被动系统的本质区别在于前者具有主动性特征。若缺乏审慎设计，主动系统可能被用户视为具有侵扰性。针对该问题，我们建立了涵盖人本化主动对话智能体三个核心维度（智能性、适应性与礼貌性）的新型分类体系。基于该分类体系，我们探讨了构建主动对话智能体五个阶段中潜在的研究机遇与挑战。本观点论文为对话式信息检索这一新兴领域奠定基础，并为人本化主动对话系统的发展指明方向。