Analysing human-human negotiations with the aim to develop a dialogue system

Abstract

We are studying human-human spoken dialogues in the Estonian dialogue corpus with the aim to design a dialogue system which carries out negotiation with a user in a natural language. Three sub-corpora have been analyzed: (1) telemarketing calls where a sales clerk of an educational company argues for taking a training course by a customer; (2) conversations between a travel agent and a customer who is planning a trip; and (3) everyday conversations where one participant argues for performing an action by the partner. A special case of negotiation – debate where the participants have contradicting communicative goals – has been implemented as an experimental dialogue system.