Zero-shot Persuasive Chatbots with LLM-Generated Strategies and Information Retrieval

Kazuaki Furumai, Roberto Legaspi, Julio Romero, Yudai Yamazaki, Yasutaka Nishimura, Sina Semnani, Kazushi Ikeda, Weiyan Shi, Monica Lam


Abstract
Persuasion plays a pivotal role in a wide range of applications from health intervention to the promotion of social good. Persuasive chatbots employed responsibly for social good can be an enabler of positive individual and social change. Existing methods rely on fine-tuning persuasive chatbots with task-specific training data which is costly, if not infeasible, to collect. Furthermore, they employ only a handful of pre-defined persuasion strategies. We propose PersuaBot, a zero-shot chatbot based on Large Language Models (LLMs) that is factual and more persuasive by leveraging many more nuanced strategies. PersuaBot uses an LLM to first generate a natural responses, from which the strategies used are extracted. To combat hallucination of LLMs, Persuabot replace any unsubstantiated claims in the response with retrieved facts supporting the extracted strategies. We applied our chatbot, PersuaBot, to three significantly different domains needing persuasion skills: donation solicitation, recommendations, and health intervention. Our experiments on simulated and human conversations show that our zero-shot approach is more persuasive than prior work, while achieving factual accuracy surpassing state-of-the-art knowledge-oriented chatbots.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-emnlp.656
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
11224–11249
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.656
DOI:
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Cite (ACL):
Kazuaki Furumai, Roberto Legaspi, Julio Romero, Yudai Yamazaki, Yasutaka Nishimura, Sina Semnani, Kazushi Ikeda, Weiyan Shi, and Monica Lam. 2024. Zero-shot Persuasive Chatbots with LLM-Generated Strategies and Information Retrieval. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, pages 11224–11249, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Zero-shot Persuasive Chatbots with LLM-Generated Strategies and Information Retrieval (Furumai et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.656.pdf