User Willingness-aware Sales Talk Dataset

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel dataset capturing user willingness in sales dialogues, enabling the development of more effective, willingness-aware sales dialogue systems through real-world scenario data collection and analysis.

Contribution

It presents the first dataset explicitly incorporating user willingness in sales dialogues, along with insights and a prototype system leveraging this data.

Findings

Collected natural sales dialogue data with user willingness annotations

Analyzed willingness patterns to inform dialogue strategies

Developed a willingness-aware sales dialogue system

Abstract

User willingness is a crucial element in the sales talk process that affects the achievement of the salesperson's or sales system's objectives. Despite the importance of user willingness, to the best of our knowledge, no previous study has addressed the development of automated sales talk dialogue systems that explicitly consider user willingness. A major barrier is the lack of sales talk datasets with reliable user willingness data. Thus, in this study, we developed a user willingness-aware sales talk collection by leveraging the ecological validity concept, which is discussed in the field of human-computer interaction. Our approach focused on three types of user willingness essential in real sales interactions. We created a dialogue environment that closely resembles real-world scenarios to elicit natural user willingness, with participants evaluating their willingness at the utterance level from multiple perspectives. We analyzed the collected data to gain insights into practical user willingness-aware sales talk strategies. In addition, as a practical application of the constructed dataset, we developed and evaluated a sales dialogue system aimed at enhancing the user's intent to purchase.