CaSiNo: A Corpus of Campsite Negotiation Dialogues for Automatic Negotiation Systems

Abstract

Automated systems that negotiate with humans have broad applications in pedagogy and conversational AI. To advance the development of practical negotiation systems, we present CaSiNo: a novel corpus of over a thousand negotiation dialogues in English. Participants take the role of campsite neighbors and negotiate for food, water, and firewood packages for their upcoming trip. Our design results in diverse and linguistically rich negotiations while maintaining a tractable, closeddomain environment. Inspired by the literature in human-human negotiations, we annotate persuasion strategies and perform correlation analysis to understand how the dialogue behaviors are associated with the negotiation performance. We further propose and evaluate a multi-task framework to recognize these strategies in a given utterance. We find that multi-task learning substantially improves the performance for all strategy labels, especially for the ones that are the most skewed. We release the dataset, annotations, and the code to propel future work in human-machine negotiations: https:// github.com/kushalchawla/CaSiNo.

Towards Emotion-Aware Agents for Negotiation Dialogues

“…Our analysis is based on the recently released CaSiNo dataset [14]. The design is an instance of Multi-Issue Bargaining Task (MIBT), which is a popular model for studying negotiations computationally [12], [34].…”

“…Further, all of them (and subsequently the developed dialogue agents) looked only at the objective outcomes of the negotiation performance such as the points scored, the final agreed price, or the optimality of the negotiated deal. Our focus is on the recently released CaSiNo dataset that enables linguistically rich conversations in a constrained, tractable environment [14]. The dataset further contains rich metadata of the participants and subjective negotiation outcomes, that we use to develop our measures in this work (Section 3).…”

“…1: A screenshot from the CaSiNo data collection interface. Taken from [14]. Please refer to the original dataset paper for more screenshots and sample negotiation dialogues.…”

“…Due to the inherent design restrictions, emotion expression merely reduces to the use of emoticons and predefined sentence templates [12]. Instead, recent efforts have explored a fundamentally different, chat-based interaction that allows human-agent communication in free-form natural language such as English [13], [14], having the potential to fill the gap between existing emotion research and the challenges in real-world negotiations.…”

“…To this end, we analyze a large-scale, linguistically rich dataset [14] that is grounded in a realistic campsite negotiation task. The associated metadata about the participants enables us to study individual differences and linguistic dialogue behaviors in the same setup.…”