Towards Emotion-Aware Agents for Negotiation Dialogues

Negotiation is a complex social interaction that encapsulates emotional encounters in human decision-making. Virtual agents that can negotiate with humans are useful in pedagogy and conversational AI. To advance the development of such agents, we explore the prediction of two important subjective goals in a negotiation - outcome satisfaction and partner perception. Specifically, we analyze the extent to which emotion attributes extracted from the negotiation help in the prediction, above and beyond the individual difference variables. We focus on a recent dataset in chat-based negotiations, grounded in a realistic camping scenario. We draw extensive qualitative and quantitative comparisons between three types of emotion variables - emoticons, as well as lexical and contextual}variables, by leveraging affective lexicons and a state-of-the-art deep learning architecture. To further validate the findings, we analyze the prediction of these subjective negotiation goals after controlling for the objective performance of the participants. We also study the temporal effects, understanding the contribution of emotion expressed in the initial and latter parts of the conversation. Finally, we discuss our insights, which will be helpful for designing adaptive negotiation agents that interact through realistic communication interfaces.