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.

近期关于主动对话代理（PCAs）的研究主要集中在提高系统在用户表达需求之前，预测和计划行动序列以完成任务和实现目标的能力。这篇论文强调了朝着强调人类需求和期望，考虑代理的伦理和社会影响，而不仅仅关注技术能力的以人为中心的 PCAs 的重要性。我们通过建立涉及智能、适应性和礼貌三个关键维度的新分类体系来解决主动系统与反应系统之间的区别，防止主动系统被人类用户视为侵入性。根据这个新分类体系，我们根据 PCAs 系统构建的五个阶段，讨论了潜在的研究机会和挑战。这篇论文为会话信息检索研究领域奠定了基础，并为推进以人为中心的主动对话系统铺平了道路。