Let’s Negotiate! A Survey of Negotiation Dialogue Systems (2024)

Abstract: Negotiation is a crucial ability in human communication. Recently, there has been a resurgent research interest in negotiation dialogue systems, whose goal is to create intelligent agents that can assist people in resolving conflicts or reaching agreements. Although there have been many explorations into negotiation dialogue systems, a systematic review of this task has not been performed to date. We aim to fill this gap by investigating recent studies in the field of negotiation dialogue systems, and covering benchmarks, evaluations and methodologies within the literature. We also discuss potential future directions, including multi-modal, multi-party and cross-cultural negotiation scenarios. Our goal is to provide the community with a systematic overview of negotiation dialogue systems and to inspire future research.

## introduction negotiation involves two or more individuals discussing goals and tactics to resolve conflicts, achieve mutual benefit, or find mutually acceptable solutions @xcite @xcite . it is commonly used to manage conflict and is the primary giveand-take process by which people try to reach an agreement @xcite . negotiations can be cooperative or competitive and are used in various social settings such as informal, peer to peer, organizational, and diplomatic country to country settings @xcite and thus the implications for enhancing outcomes are vast. however, humans are naturally subject to various biases and can be swayed by emotion during negotiations, making them inclined to overlook useful implicit information from other participants in the negotiation process and hindering optimal outcomes. negotiators also often lack the necessary skills, training and knowledge to achieve their desired goals @xcite . ## negotiations from a social science perspective in this section, we will first introduce a framework for human negotiation from social sciences, then discuss human limitations in negotiation, which motivates nlp researchers/practitioners to develop strong negotiation dialogue systems. @xcite propose a comprehensive framework for a two-party negotiation process, as shown in figure 2 . preferences and strategies of the negotiators determine the potential outcomes and the interaction of the negotiation process. the preferences of both negotiators create the potential outcome that may be reached by them. the negotiators' strategies, defined as the goal-directed behaviors that are used in order to reach an agreement @xcite , affect the interaction, ultimately determining how much of that potential outcome created by the negotiators' preferences is obtained. ## methodology overviews in negotiation dialogues, negotiators interact with each other in a strategic discussion to reach a final goal. as discussed above, strategies and preferences significantly affect the negotiation outcomes. ## negotiation datasets in this section, we summarize the existing negotiation datasets and resources. ## evaluation we categorize the methods for evaluating the negotiation dialogue systems into three types: goaloriented evaluation, game-based evaluation and human evaluation. ## new frontiers and challenges the previous sections summarize the prominent achievements of previous work in negotiation dialogue, including benchmarks, evaluation metrics, and methodology. in this section, we will discuss some new frontiers that allow negotiation dialogue systems to be fit to actual application needs and to be applied in real-world scenarios. ## conclusion this paper presents the first systematic review on the progress of negotiation dialogue systems. we firstly provide an understanding of negotiation between humans from a social science perspective. then we thoroughly summarize the existing works, which covers various domains and highlight their challenges, respectively. we additionally summarize currently available methodologies, bench-marks, and evaluation methods. we also shed light on some new trends in this research field. we hope this survey inspires and facilitates future research on negotiation dialogue systems.