Dialogue systems capable of social influence such as persuasion, negotiation, and therapy, are essential for extending the use of technology to numerous realistic scenarios. However, existing research primarily focuses on either task-oriented or open-domain scenarios, a categorization that has been inadequate for capturing influence skills systematically. There exists no formal definition or category for dialogue systems with these skills and data-driven efforts in this direction are highly limited. In this work, we formally define and introduce the category of social influence dialogue systems that influence users' cognitive and emotional responses, leading to changes in thoughts, opinions, and behaviors through natural conversations. We present a survey of various tasks, datasets, and methods, compiling the progress across seven diverse domains. We discuss the commonalities and differences between the examined systems, identify limitations, and recommend future directions. This study serves as a comprehensive reference for social influence dialogue systems to inspire more dedicated research and discussion in this emerging area.

Negotiation is a complex social interaction that encapsulates emotional encounters in human decision-making. Virtual agents that can negotiate with humans are useful in pedagogy and conversational AI. To advance the development of such agents, we explore the prediction of two important subjective goals in a negotiation - outcome satisfaction and partner perception. Specifically, we analyze the extent to which emotion attributes extracted from the negotiation help in the prediction, above and beyond the individual difference variables. We focus on a recent dataset in chat-based negotiations, grounded in a realistic camping scenario. We study three degrees of emotion dimensions - emoticons, lexical, and contextual by leveraging affective lexicons and a state-of-the-art deep learning architecture. Our insights will be helpful in designing adaptive negotiation agents that interact through realistic communication interfaces.

Automated systems that negotiate with humans have broad applications in pedagogy and conversational AI. To advance the development of practical negotiation systems, we present CaSiNo: a novel corpus of over a thousand negotiation dialogues in English. Participants take the role of campsite neighbors and negotiate for food, water, and firewood packages for their upcoming trip. Our design results in diverse and linguistically rich negotiations while maintaining a tractable, closed-domain environment. Inspired by the literature in human-human negotiations, we annotate persuasion strategies and perform correlation analysis to understand how the dialogue behaviors are associated with the negotiation performance. We further propose and evaluate a multi-task framework to recognize these strategies in a given utterance. We find that multi-task learning substantially improves the performance for all strategy labels, especially for the ones that are the most skewed. We release the dataset, annotations, and the code to propel future work in human-machine negotiations: https://github.com/kushalchawla/CaSiNo

This document describes Pilot, our submission for Human-Agent Negotiation Challenge at IJCAI 2020. Pilot is a virtual human that participates in a sequence of three negotiations with a human partner. Our system is based on the Interactive Arbitration Guide Online (IAGO) negotiation framework. We leverage prior Affective Computing and Psychology research in negotiations to guide various key principles that define the behavior and personality of our agent. Pilot has been selected as one of the finalists for presentation at IJCAI.

Negotiation is the complex social process by which multiple parties come to mutual agreement over a series of issues. As such, it has proven to be a key challenge problem for designing adequately social AIs that can effectively navigate this space. Artificial AI agents that are capable of negotiating must be capable of realizing policies and strategies that govern offer acceptances, offer generation, preference elicitation, and more. But the next generation of agents must also adapt to reflect their users’ experiences.      The best human negotiators tend to have honed their craft through hours of practice and experience. But, not all negotiators agree on which strategic tactics to use, and endorsement of deceptive tactics in particular is a controversial topic for many negotiators. We examine the ways in which deceptive tactics are used and endorsed in non-repeated human negotiation and show that prior experience plays a key role in governing what tactics are seen as acceptable or useful in negotiation. Previous work has indicated that people that negotiate through artificial agent representatives may be more inclined to fairness than those people that negotiate directly. We present a series of three user studies that challenge this initial assumption and expand on this picture by examining the role of past experience.      This work constructs a new scale for measuring endorsement of manipulative negotiation tactics and introduces its use to artificial intelligence research. It continues by presenting the results of a series of three studies that examine how negotiating experience can change what negotiation tactics and strategies human endorse. Study #1 looks at human endorsement of deceptive techniques based on prior negotiating experience as well as representative effects. Study #2 further characterizes the negativity of prior experience in relation to endorsement of deceptive techniques. Finally, in Study #3, we show that the lessons learned from the empirical observations in Study #1 and #2 can in fact be induced—by designing agents that provide a specific type of negative experience, human endorsement of deception can be predictably manipulated.

We present the SimSensei system, a fully automatic virtual agent that conducts interviews to assess indicators of psychological distress. We emphasize on the perception part of the system, a multimodal framework which captures and analyzes user state for both behavioral understanding and interactional purposes.