Initiative taking in negotiation

Abstract

We examine the relationship between initiative behavior in negotiation dialogues and the goals and outcomes of the negotiation. We propose a novel annotation scheme for dialogue initiative, including four labels for initiative and response behavior in a dialogue turn. We annotate an existing human-human negotiation dataset, and use initiative-based features to try to predict both negotiation goal and outcome, comparing our results to prior work using other (non-initiative) features sets. Results show that combining initiative features with other features leads to improvements over either set and a majority class baseline.