Wizard of Oz Interface to Study System Initiative for Conversational Search

We describe a Wizard of Oz (WoZ) system, a WebApp, which we use to study how a conversational search system should take the initiative when engaging with users during collaborative search. This system integrates directly into Slack, a chat-messaging platform where users will collaborate. Through our system, the Wizard plays the role of a conversational search system that can search for information, send relevant web results, and message users. In our research, we study three Wizard conditions: bot\_info, bot\_dialog, and bot\_task, which differ in terms of how the Wizard can intervene in a conversation. The intervention modes follow the mixed-initiative framework by Chu-Carroll and Brown~\citechu1997tracking and provide us a foundation to study system initiative for conversational search. In this paper, we describe our design decisions and technical details on how we implemented the system.