Abhisek Tiwari


2022

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Persona or Context? Towards Building Context adaptive Personalized Persuasive Virtual Sales Assistant
Abhisek Tiwari | Sriparna Saha | Shubhashis Sengupta | Anutosh Maitra | Roshni Ramnani | Pushpak Bhattacharyya
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)

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.