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.

翻译：近年来，探索具有更复杂目标的对话（如谈判、劝说和情感支持）引起了广泛关注，这类对话超越了传统的服务型对话系统。除了需要更复杂的策略推理和沟通技巧外，这些任务的一个重大挑战在于难以用可量化的方式客观衡量目标的实现程度，导致现有研究难以直接优化对话过程以达成目标。在本工作中，我们强调复杂对话目标的多面性，并认为通过综合考虑并协同推进其不同方面来达成目标更为可行。为此，我们提出了一种新型对话框架Cooper，该框架协调多个专业智能体，每个智能体分别专注于对话目标的特定方面，以协作方式实现复杂目标。通过这种分而治之的方法，我们使复杂对话目标更易实现，并通过各个智能体的协作激发更强的智能。在劝说和情感支持对话上的实验表明，我们的方法优于一系列强基线模型。