Jack Luigi Henry Contro
2025
Is this Chatbot Trying to Sell Something? Towards Oversight of Chatbot Sales Tactics
Simrat Deol
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Jack Luigi Henry Contro
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Martim Brandao
Proceedings of the 9th Widening NLP Workshop
This research investigates the detection of covert sales tactics in human-chatbot interactions with a focus on the classification of solicited and unsolicited product recommendations. A custom dataset of 630 conversations was generated using a Large Language Model (LLM) to simulate chatbot-user interactions in various contexts, such as when interacting with users from different age groups, recommending different types of products and using different types of sales tactics. We then employ various approaches, including BiLSTM-based classification with sentence and word-level embeddings, as well as zero-shot, few-shot and CoT classification on large state-of-the-art LLMs. Our results show that few-shot GPT4 (86.44%) is the most accurate model on our dataset, followed by our compact SBERT+BiLSTM model (78.63%) - despite its small size.Our work demonstrates the feasibility of implementing oversight algorithms for monitoring chatbot conversations for undesired practices and that such monitoring could potentially be implemented locally on-device to mitigate privacy concerns. This research thus lays the groundwork for the development of auditing and oversight methods for virtual assistants such as chatbots, allowing consumer protection agencies to monitor the ethical use of conversational AI.