Persuasion for Good: Towards a Personalized Persuasive Dialogue System for Social Good

Xuewei Wang, Weiyan Shi, Richard Kim, Yoojung Oh, Sijia Yang, Jingwen Zhang, Zhou Yu


Abstract
Developing intelligent persuasive conversational agents to change people’s opinions and actions for social good is the frontier in advancing the ethical development of automated dialogue systems. To do so, the first step is to understand the intricate organization of strategic disclosures and appeals employed in human persuasion conversations. We designed an online persuasion task where one participant was asked to persuade the other to donate to a specific charity. We collected a large dataset with 1,017 dialogues and annotated emerging persuasion strategies from a subset. Based on the annotation, we built a baseline classifier with context information and sentence-level features to predict the 10 persuasion strategies used in the corpus. Furthermore, to develop an understanding of personalized persuasion processes, we analyzed the relationships between individuals’ demographic and psychological backgrounds including personality, morality, value systems, and their willingness for donation. Then, we analyzed which types of persuasion strategies led to a greater amount of donation depending on the individuals’ personal backgrounds. This work lays the ground for developing a personalized persuasive dialogue system.
Anthology ID:
P19-1566
Volume:
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
July
Year:
2019
Address:
Florence, Italy
Editors:
Anna Korhonen, David Traum, Lluís Màrquez
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5635–5649
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-1566
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P19-1566
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xuewei Wang, Weiyan Shi, Richard Kim, Yoojung Oh, Sijia Yang, Jingwen Zhang, and Zhou Yu. 2019. Persuasion for Good: Towards a Personalized Persuasive Dialogue System for Social Good. In Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 5635–5649, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Persuasion for Good: Towards a Personalized Persuasive Dialogue System for Social Good (Wang et al., ACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-1566.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/P19-1566.mp4
Code
 ucdavisnlp/persuasionforgood +  additional community code