ResPer: Computationally Modelling Resisting Strategies in Persuasive Conversations

Ritam Dutt, Sayan Sinha, Rishabh Joshi, Surya Shekhar Chakraborty, Meredith Riggs, Xinru Yan, Haogang Bao, Carolyn Rose


Abstract
Modelling persuasion strategies as predictors of task outcome has several real-world applications and has received considerable attention from the computational linguistics community. However, previous research has failed to account for the resisting strategies employed by an individual to foil such persuasion attempts. Grounded in prior literature in cognitive and social psychology, we propose a generalised framework for identifying resisting strategies in persuasive conversations. We instantiate our framework on two distinct datasets comprising persuasion and negotiation conversations. We also leverage a hierarchical sequence-labelling neural architecture to infer the aforementioned resisting strategies automatically. Our experiments reveal the asymmetry of power roles in non-collaborative goal-directed conversations and the benefits accrued from incorporating resisting strategies on the final conversation outcome. We also investigate the role of different resisting strategies on the conversation outcome and glean insights that corroborate with past findings. We also make the code and the dataset of this work publicly available at https://github.com/americast/resper.
Anthology ID:
2021.eacl-main.7
Volume:
Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume
Month:
April
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Paola Merlo, Jorg Tiedemann, Reut Tsarfaty
Venue:
EACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
78–90
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.eacl-main.7
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.eacl-main.7
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ritam Dutt, Sayan Sinha, Rishabh Joshi, Surya Shekhar Chakraborty, Meredith Riggs, Xinru Yan, Haogang Bao, and Carolyn Rose. 2021. ResPer: Computationally Modelling Resisting Strategies in Persuasive Conversations. In Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume, pages 78–90, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
ResPer: Computationally Modelling Resisting Strategies in Persuasive Conversations (Dutt et al., EACL 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.eacl-main.7.pdf
Code
 americast/resper