GENTEEL-NEGOTIATOR: LLM-Enhanced Mixture-of-Expert-Based Reinforcement Learning Approach for Polite Negotiation Dialogue

Developing intelligent negotiation dialogue systems that resolve conflicts and promote equitable, inclusive, and sustainable outcomes is at the forefront of advancing automated negotiation technology for social good. Negotiation involves balancing cooperation and competition to maximize value without causing offense. Using polite language fosters mutual understanding and creates a respectful and collaborative environment essential for successful negotiations in various domains. Considering this, in this paper, we propose a polite negotiation dialogue system, GENTEEL-NEGOTIATOR for social good applications to boost the overall quality of negotiation outcomes. We focus on developing a negotiation dialogue system for two key application areas, namely tourism and e-commerce. We begin by curating a unique negotiation dialogue dataset, NEGOCHAT for tourism. We further enrich the NEGOCHAT and Integrative Negotiation Dataset (IND) for e-commerce with various negotiation strategies. These datasets are then used to develop the GENTEEL-NEGOTIATOR, leveraging the Large Language Model (LLM) and mixture-of-expert (MoE)-based reinforcement learning approach. The proposed MoE-based method employs heuristic experts dedicated to negotiation, politeness, and dialogue coherence to facilitate the learning of diverse semantics by analyzing the dialogue context. A novel reward function with negotiation strategy congruence, politeness, dialogue coherence, and engagingness rewards is designed to guide the policy’s learning for generating responses. Automatic and human evaluations on NEGOCHAT and IND datasets validate the effectiveness of GENTEEL-NEGOTIATOR in generating polite responses during negotiation while maintaining conversation goals, including coherence and engagingness.