Persona or Context? Towards Building Context adaptive Personalized Persuasive Virtual Sales Assistant

Abhisek Tiwari, Sriparna Saha, Shubhashis Sengupta, Anutosh Maitra, Roshni Ramnani, Pushpak Bhattacharyya


Abstract
Task-oriented conversational agents are gaining immense popularity and success in a wide range of tasks, from flight ticket booking to online shopping. However, the existing systems presume that end-users will always have a pre-determined and servable task goal, which results in dialogue failure in hostile scenarios, such as goal unavailability. On the other hand, human agents accomplish users’ tasks even in a large number of goal unavailability scenarios by persuading them towards a very similar and servable goal. Motivated by the limitation, we propose and build a novel end-to-end multi-modal persuasive dialogue system incorporated with a personalized persuasive module aided goal controller and goal persuader. The goal controller recognizes goal conflicting/unavailability scenarios and formulates a new goal, while the goal persuader persuades users using a personalized persuasive strategy identified through dialogue context. We also present a novel automatic evaluation metric called Persuasiveness Measurement Rate (PMeR) for quantifying the persuasive capability of a conversational agent. The obtained improvements (both quantitative and qualitative) firmly establish the superiority and need of the proposed context-guided, personalized persuasive virtual agent over existing traditional task-oriented virtual agents. Furthermore, we also curated a multi-modal persuasive conversational dialogue corpus annotated with intent, slot, sentiment, and dialogue act for e-commerce domain.
Anthology ID:
2022.aacl-main.76
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2nd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 12th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
November
Year:
2022
Address:
Online only
Editors:
Yulan He, Heng Ji, Sujian Li, Yang Liu, Chua-Hui Chang
Venues:
AACL | IJCNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1035–1047
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-main.76
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Abhisek Tiwari, Sriparna Saha, Shubhashis Sengupta, Anutosh Maitra, Roshni Ramnani, and Pushpak Bhattacharyya. 2022. Persona or Context? Towards Building Context adaptive Personalized Persuasive Virtual Sales Assistant. In Proceedings of the 2nd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 12th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 1035–1047, Online only. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Persona or Context? Towards Building Context adaptive Personalized Persuasive Virtual Sales Assistant (Tiwari et al., AACL-IJCNLP 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-main.76.pdf