COLING 2025main0 citations

User Willingness-aware Sales Talk Dataset

Asahi Hentona, Jun Baba, Shiki Sato, Reina Akama

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.

BibTeX
@inproceedings{hentona-etal-2025-user,
    title = "User Willingness-aware Sales Talk Dataset",
    author = "Hentona, Asahi  and
      Baba, Jun  and
      Sato, Shiki  and
      Akama, Reina",
    editor = "Rambow, Owen  and
      Wanner, Leo  and
      Apidianaki, Marianna  and
      Al-Khalifa, Hend  and
      Eugenio, Barbara Di  and
      Schockaert, Steven",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics",
    month = jan,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Abu Dhabi, UAE",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.742/",
    pages = "11206--11217"
}
User Willingness-aware Sales Talk Dataset · COLING 2025