Before revision: The task of building automatic agents that can negotiate with humans in free-form natural language has gained recent interest in the literature. Although there have been initial attempts, combining linguistic understanding with strategy effectively still remains a challenge. Towards this end, we aim to understand the role of natural language in negotiations from a data-driven perspective by attempting to predict a negotiation's outcome, well before the negotiation is complete. Building on the recent advancements in pre-trained language encoders, our model is able to predict correctly within 10\% for more than 70\% of the cases, by looking at just 60\% of the negotiation. These results suggest that rather than just being a way to realize a negotiation, natural language should be incorporated in the negotiation planning as well. Such a framework can be directly used to get feedback for training an automatically negotiating agent .
After revision: The task of building automatic agents that can negotiate with humans find broad applications in pedagogy and conversational AI. Most efforts in human-agent negotiations rely on restrictive menu-driven interfaces for communication. To advance the research in language-based negotiation systems, we explore a novel task of early prediction of buyer-seller negotiation outcomes, by varying the fraction of utterances that the model can access. We explore the feasibility of early prediction by using traditional feature-based methods, as well as by incorporating the non-linguistic task context into a pretrained language model using sentence templates. We further quantify the extent to which linguistic features help in making better predictions apart from the task-specific price information. Finally, probing the pretrained model helps us to identify specific features, such as trust and agreement, that contribute to the prediction performance .