OpinionConv: Conversational Product Search with Grounded Opinions
Vahid Sadiri Javadi Martin Potthast Lucie Flek
When searching for products, the opinions of others play an important role in
making informed decisions. Subjective experiences about a product can be a
valuable source of information. This is also true in sales conversations, where
a customer and a sales assistant exchange facts and opinions about products.
However, training an AI for such conversations is complicated by the fact that
language models do not possess authentic opinions for their lack of real-world
experience. We address this problem by leveraging product reviews as a rich
source of product opinions to ground conversational AI in true subjective
narratives. With OpinionConv, we develop the first conversational AI for
simulating sales conversations. To validate the generated conversations, we
conduct several user studies showing that the generated opinions are perceived
as realistic. Our assessors also confirm the importance of opinions as an
informative basis for decision-making.