Persuasive dialogue requires multi-turn following and planning abilities to achieve the goal of persuading users, which is still challenging even for state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs). Previous works focus on retrieval-based models or generative models in a specific domain due to a lack of data across multiple domains. In this paper, we leverage GPT-4 to create the first multi-domain persuasive dialogue dataset DailyPersuasion. Then we propose a general method named PersuGPT to learn a persuasion model based on LLMs through intent-to-strategy reasoning, which summarizes the intent of user’s utterance and reasons next strategy to respond. Moreover, we design a simulation-based preference optimization, which utilizes a learned user model and our model to simulate next turns and estimate their rewards more accurately. Experimental results on two datasets indicate that our proposed method outperforms all baselines in terms of automatic evaluation metric Win-Rate and human evaluation. The code and data are available at https://persugpt.github.io.

Persuasive dialogue aims to persuade users to achieve some targets by conversations. While previous persuasion models have achieved notable successes, they mostly base themselves on utterance semantic matching, and an important aspect has been ignored, that is, the strategy of the conversations, for example, the agent can choose an emotional-appeal strategy to impress users. Compared with utterance semantics, conversation strategies are high-level concepts, which can be informative and provide complementary information to achieve effective persuasions. In this paper, we propose to build a persuasion model by jointly modeling the conversation semantics and strategies, where we design a BERT-like module and an auto-regressive predictor to match the semantics and strategies, respectively. Experimental results indicate that our proposed approach can significantly improve the state-of-the-art baseline by 5% on a small dataset and 37% on a large dataset in terms of Recall@1. Detailed analyses show that the auto-regressive predictor contributes most to the final performance.