COOPER: Coordinating Specialized Agents towards a Complex Dialogue Goal
Yi Cheng Wenge Liu Jian Wang Chak Tou Leong Yi Ouyang Wenjie Li Xian Wu Yefeng Zheng
In recent years, there has been a growing interest in exploring dialogues
with more complex goals, such as negotiation, persuasion, and emotional
support, which go beyond traditional service-focused dialogue systems. Apart
from the requirement for much more sophisticated strategic reasoning and
communication skills, a significant challenge of these tasks lies in the
difficulty of objectively measuring the achievement of their goals in a
quantifiable way, making it difficult for existing research to directly
optimize the dialogue procedure towards them. In our work, we emphasize the
multifaceted nature of complex dialogue goals and argue that it is more
feasible to accomplish them by comprehensively considering and jointly
promoting their different aspects. To this end, we propose a novel dialogue
framework, Cooper, which coordinates multiple specialized agents, each
dedicated to a specific dialogue goal aspect separately, to approach the
complex objective. Through this divide-and-conquer manner, we make complex
dialogue goals more approachable and elicit greater intelligence via the
collaboration of individual agents. Experiments on persuasion and emotional
support dialogues demonstrate the superiority of our method over a set of
competitive baselines.