Abstract
When searching for products, the opinions of others play an important role in making informed decisions. Subjective experiences about a product can be a valuable source of information. This is also true in sales conversations, where a customer and a sales assistant exchange facts and opinions about products. However, training an AI for such conversations is complicated by the fact that language models do not possess authentic opinions for their lack of real-world experience. We address this problem by leveraging product reviews as a rich source of product opinions to ground conversational AI in true subjective narratives. With OpinionConv, we develop the first conversational AI for simulating sales conversations. To validate the generated conversations, we conduct several user studies showing that the generated opinions are perceived as realistic. Our assessors also confirm the importance of opinions as an informative basis for decision making.- Anthology ID:
- 2023.sigdial-1.6
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 24th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue
- Month:
- September
- Year:
- 2023
- Address:
- Prague, Czechia
- Editors:
- Svetlana Stoyanchev, Shafiq Joty, David Schlangen, Ondrej Dusek, Casey Kennington, Malihe Alikhani
- Venue:
- SIGDIAL
- SIG:
- SIGDIAL
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 66–76
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2023.sigdial-1.6
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2023.sigdial-1.6
- Cite (ACL):
- Vahid Sadiri Javadi, Martin Potthast, and Lucie Flek. 2023. OpinionConv: Conversational Product Search with Grounded Opinions. In Proceedings of the 24th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, pages 66–76, Prague, Czechia. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- OpinionConv: Conversational Product Search with Grounded Opinions (Sadiri Javadi et al., SIGDIAL 2023)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/corrections-2024-07/2023.sigdial-1.6.pdf