Show, Price and Negotiate: A Negotiator with Online Value Look-Ahead
This work addresses the challenge of intelligent negotiation agents for online shopping, representing an incremental advance by integrating multiple novel components into a modular system.
The paper tackles the problem of automated negotiation in online shopping by proposing a modular deep neural network that incorporates item images and external price data to predict values and generate negotiation dialogues, achieving significant improvements in agreement price, consistency, and dialogue quality on the CraigslistBargain dataset.
Negotiation, as an essential and complicated aspect of online shopping, is still challenging for an intelligent agent. To that end, we propose the Price Negotiator, a modular deep neural network that addresses the unsolved problems in recent studies by (1) considering images of the items as a crucial, though neglected, source of information in a negotiation, (2) heuristically finding the most similar items from an external online source to predict the potential value and an acceptable agreement price, (3) predicting a general price-based action at each turn which is fed into the language generator to output the supporting natural language, and (4) adjusting the prices based on the predicted actions. Empirically, we show that our model, that is trained in both supervised and reinforcement learning setting, significantly improves negotiation on the CraigslistBargain dataset, in terms of the agreement price, price consistency, and dialogue quality.