MindDial: Enhancing Conversational Agents with Theory-of-Mind for Common Ground Alignment and Negotiation

Shuwen Qiu, Mingdian Liu, Hengli Li, Song-Chun Zhu, Zilong Zheng


Abstract
Humans talk in daily conversations while aligning and negotiating the expressed meanings or common ground. Despite the impressive conversational abilities of the large generative language models, they do not consider the individual differences in contextual understanding in a shared situated environment. In this work, we propose MindDial, a novel conversational framework that can generate situated free-form responses to align and negotiate common ground. We design an explicit mind module that can track three-level beliefs – the speaker’s belief, the speaker’s prediction of the listener’s belief, and the belief gap between the first two. Then the next response is generated to resolve the belief difference and take task-related action. Our framework is applied to both prompting and fine-tuning-based models, and is evaluated across scenarios involving both common ground alignment and negotiation. Experiments show that models with mind modeling can generate more human-like responses when aligning and negotiating common ground. The ablation study further validates the three-level belief design can aggregate information and improve task outcomes in both cooperative and negotiating settings.
Anthology ID:
2024.sigdial-1.63
Volume:
Proceedings of the 25th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue
Month:
September
Year:
2024
Address:
Kyoto, Japan
Editors:
Tatsuya Kawahara, Vera Demberg, Stefan Ultes, Koji Inoue, Shikib Mehri, David Howcroft, Kazunori Komatani
Venue:
SIGDIAL
SIG:
SIGDIAL
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
746–759
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.sigdial-1.63
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.sigdial-1.63
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shuwen Qiu, Mingdian Liu, Hengli Li, Song-Chun Zhu, and Zilong Zheng. 2024. MindDial: Enhancing Conversational Agents with Theory-of-Mind for Common Ground Alignment and Negotiation. In Proceedings of the 25th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, pages 746–759, Kyoto, Japan. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
MindDial: Enhancing Conversational Agents with Theory-of-Mind for Common Ground Alignment and Negotiation (Qiu et al., SIGDIAL 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.sigdial-1.63.pdf