Training AI to Better Negotiate with Humans Jul 1 2021 Despite unprecedented advancements in technology and countless depictions of complex human-AI interactions in sci-fi movies, we have yet to fully achieve AI bots that can engage in conversation as naturally as humans can. Kushal Chawla, researcher at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) and a doctoral student in computer science, along with collaborators at both the USC Information Sciences Institute (ISI) and ICT are taking us one step closer to this reality by teaching AI how to negotiate with humans. The research, presented at the 2021 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) this month, relied on a scenario-based dataset that was collected to teach negotiation skills to human users through role-play dialogue. With a campsite setting as the imaginary backdrop, participants in the data collection study were instructed to interact with each other as if they were campers negotiating for resources. The researchers discovered a total of nine strategies that the participants utilized throughout the exercise. The stand out lesson: cooperative strategies of negotiation were more effective than selfish strategies. This information can be used in the future to inform the creation of an automated system which takes various strategies of negotiation into account.