SOGO: A Social Intelligent Negotiation Dialogue System

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a semi-automatic social intelligent negotiation dialogue system that interweaves task utterance with conversational strategies to engage human users in negotiation. Our two-phase system operates sequentially in a reasoning-and-generation loop: In the task phase, we leverage an off-the-shelf end-to-end dialogue model for negotiation to build a dialogue manager which decides the next system's task intention. Then, during the social phase, we employ a theory-driven, template-based natural language generator to realize the task intention as a genre of social conversational strategy. Subsequently, a set of conversational strategies are presented to a human expert who decides the final sentence to be uttered by the dialogue system. Compared to the baseline system, our proposed social intelligent dialogue system achieves a higher agreement rate and more "good deals" with humans while building interpersonal rapport.