Towards Emotion-Aware Agents for Improved User Satisfaction and Partner Perception in Negotiation Dialogues

Abstract

Negotiation is a complex social interaction that encapsulates emotional encounters in human decision-making. Virtual agents that can negotiate with humans by the means of language are useful in pedagogy and conversational AI. To advance the development of such agents, we explore the role of emotion in the prediction of two important subjective goals in a negotiation – outcome satisfaction and partner perception. We devise ways to measure and compare different degrees of emotion expression in negotiation dialogues, consisting of <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">emoticon</i> , <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">lexical</i> , and <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">contextual</i> variables. Through an extensive analysis of a large-scale dataset in chat-based negotiations, we find that incorporating emotion expression explains significantly more variance, above and beyond the demographics and personality traits of the participants. Further, our temporal analysis reveals that emotive information from both early and later stages of the negotiation contributes to this prediction, indicating the need for a continual learning model of capturing emotion for automated agents. Finally, we extend our analysis to another dataset, showing promise that our findings generalize to more complex scenarios. We conclude by discussing our insights, which will be helpful for designing adaptive negotiation agents that interact through realistic communication interfaces.