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.

翻译：在搜索产品时，他人的观点在做出明智决策中扮演重要角色。关于产品的主观体验是宝贵的信息来源，这同样适用于销售对话场景——客户与销售助理会围绕产品交流事实与观点。然而，由于语言模型缺乏真实世界经验，不具备真实观点，训练此类对话的人工智能系统面临挑战。我们通过将产品评论作为丰富观点来源，使对话式AI植根于真实主观叙事，从而解决这一问题。借助OpinConv，我们首次开发出用于模拟销售对话的对话式AI系统。为验证生成的对话质量，我们开展多项用户研究，表明生成的观点被感知为真实可信。评估人员也证实了观点作为决策信息基础的重要性。