A Dialogue Game for Eliciting Balanced Collaboration

Jeknic, Isidora and Schlangen, David and Koller, Alexander

Collaboration is an integral part of human dialogue. Typical task-oriented dialogue games assign asymmetric roles to the participants, which limits their ability to elicit naturalistic role-taking in collaboration and its negotiation. We present a novel and simple online setup that favors balanced collaboration: a two-player 2D object placement game in which the players must negotiate the goal state themselves. We show empirically that human players exhibit a variety of role distributions, and that balanced collaboration improves task performance. We also present an LLM-based baseline agent which demonstrates that automatic playing of our game is an interesting challenge for artificial systems.

In Proceedings of the 25th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue , 2024
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@inproceedings{Jeknic-2024,
  title = {A Dialogue Game for Eliciting Balanced Collaboration},
  author = {Jeknic, Isidora and Schlangen, David and Koller, Alexander},
  editor = {Kawahara, Tatsuya and Demberg, Vera and Ultes, Stefan and Inoue, Koji and Mehri, Shikib and Howcroft, David and Komatani, Kazunori},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 25th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue},
  month = sep,
  year = {2024},
  address = {Kyoto, Japan},
  publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/2024.sigdial-1.41},
  pages = {477--489}
}