Enhancing Persuasive Dialogue Agents by Synthesizing Cross‐Disciplinary Communication Strategies

Shinnosuke Nozue, Yuto Nakano, Yotaro Watanabe, Meguru Takasaki, Shoji Moriya, Reina Akama, Jun Suzuki


Abstract
Current approaches to developing persuasive dialogue agents often rely on a limited set of predefined persuasive strategies that fail to capture the complexity of real-world interactions. We applied a cross-disciplinary approach to develop a framework for designing persuasive dialogue agents that draws on proven strategies from social psychology, behavioral economics, and communication theory. We validated our proposed framework through experiments on two distinct datasets: the Persuasion for Good dataset, which represents a specific in-domain scenario, and the DailyPersuasion dataset, which encompasses a wide range of scenarios. The proposed framework achieved strong results for both datasets and demonstrated notable improvement in the persuasion success rate as well as promising generalizability. Notably, the proposed framework also excelled at persuading individuals with initially low intent, which addresses a critical challenge for persuasive dialogue agents.
Anthology ID:
2025.emnlp-industry.158
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou (China)
Editors:
Saloni Potdar, Lina Rojas-Barahona, Sebastien Montella
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2287–2312
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.emnlp-industry.158/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shinnosuke Nozue, Yuto Nakano, Yotaro Watanabe, Meguru Takasaki, Shoji Moriya, Reina Akama, and Jun Suzuki. 2025. Enhancing Persuasive Dialogue Agents by Synthesizing Cross‐Disciplinary Communication Strategies. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track, pages 2287–2312, Suzhou (China). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Enhancing Persuasive Dialogue Agents by Synthesizing Cross‐Disciplinary Communication Strategies (Nozue et al., EMNLP 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.emnlp-industry.158.pdf