User Willingness-aware Sales Talk Dataset
This addresses the problem of building more effective sales dialogue systems for salespeople or systems, but it is incremental as it focuses on dataset creation rather than a novel method.
The study tackled the lack of datasets for automated sales talk dialogue systems by developing a user willingness-aware sales talk collection using ecological validity, and applied it to create a sales dialogue system aimed at enhancing purchase intent.
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.