Papers by Kushal Chawla
Social Influence Dialogue Systems: A Survey of Datasets and Models For Social Influence Tasks (2023.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing research focuses on task-oriented or open-domain dialogue systems with influence skills. |
| Approach: | They propose to define and introduce a category of social influence dialogue systems that influence users’ cognitive and emotional responses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system is task-oriented or goal-oriented, but it is not open-domain. |
CaSiNo: A Corpus of Campsite Negotiation Dialogues for Automatic Negotiation Systems (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing systems that negotiate with humans have broad applications in pedagogy and conversational AI. |
| Approach: | They propose to annotate persuasion strategies and perform correlation analysis to understand how dialogue behaviors are associated with the negotiation performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system improves negotiation performance for all strategies labeled as skewed . the proposed system is available on github.com/kushalchawla/ . |
Investigating Content Planning for Navigating Trade-offs in Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue (2024.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Knowledge-grounded dialogues require a balance between being specific to what the conversation partner has said and being attributable to an underlying source document. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that allows to experiment with various plan variables supported by prior work . they show that metric-aware planning mechanisms are better at automatic evaluations but underperform in human judgment compared to metric agnostic mechanisms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework supports metric-agnostic and metric aware content planning, but it underperforms in human judgment. |
RAFFLES: Reasoning-based Attribution of Faults for LLM Systems (2026.eacl-long)
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Chenyang Zhu, Spencer Hong, Jingyu Wu, Kushal Chawla, Yuhui Tang, Youbing Yin, Nathan Wolfe, Erin Babinsky, Daben Liu
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation frameworks focus on simple metrics and end-to-end outcomes, but they struggle with longer contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose an offline evaluation architecture that incorporates iterative reasoning to evaluate the quality of the candidate faults and rationales of the Judge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture outperforms baseline evaluation frameworks with two datasets to identify step-level faults in multi-agent systems and ReasonEval datasets. |
Lessons from the Field: An Adaptable Lifecycle Approach to Applied Dialogue Summarization (2026.eacl-industry)
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Kushal Chawla, Chenyang Zhu, Pengshan Cai, Sangwoo Cho, Scott Novotney, Ayushman Singh, Jonah Lewis, Keasha Safewright, Alfy Samuel, Erin Babinsky, Shi-Xiong Zhang, Sambit Sahu
| Challenge: | Summarization of multi-party dialogues is a critical capability in industry . but generating high-quality summaries in practice is challenging . prior work has focused on static datasets and benchmarks, a condition rare in practical scenarios . |
| Approach: | They present an agentic system to summarize multi-party interactions using static datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can summarize multi-party interactions using a set of complex requirements. |
KODIS: A Multicultural Dispute Resolution Dialogue Corpus (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | KODIS is a dyadic dispute resolution corpus containing thousands of dialogues from over 75 countries. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a dyadic dispute resolution corpus to examine how conflicts escalate through conversation rather than deal-making. |
| Outcome: | The proposed corpus contains thousands of dialogues from over 75 countries. |
Be Selfish, But Wisely: Investigating the Impact of Agent Personality in Mixed-Motive Human-Agent Interactions (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | A natural way to design a negotiation dialogue system is via self-play RL: train an agent that learns to maximize its performance by interacting with a simulated user that has been designed to imitate human-human dialogue data. |
| Approach: | They propose to use RL to train an agent that learns to maximize its performance by interacting with a simulated user that has been designed to imitate human-human dialogue data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system fails to learn the value of compromise in a negotiation, which can lead to no agreements, and ultimately hurt the model's overall performance. |
Are LLMs Effective Negotiators? Systematic Evaluation of the Multifaceted Capabilities of LLMs in Negotiation Dialogues (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being utilized as AI negotiation agents . however, prior research on LLMs lacks a systematic evaluation of their diverse capabilities in negotiation. |
| Approach: | They propose to analyze the multifaceted capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) across diverse dialogue scenarios throughout the stages of a typical negotiation interaction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms GPT-4 in many negotiation tasks while identifying specific challenges, such as making subjective assessments and generating contextually appropriate, strategically advantageous responses. |
Aff2Vec: Affect–Enriched Distributional Word Representations (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | Affective word distributions are not well understood in literature. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that embeds affective word interpretations into enriched word embeddings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art in word-similarity tasks and in emotion analysis, personality detection, and frustration prediction tasks. |
Opponent Modeling in Negotiation Dialogues by Related Data Adaptation (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | In a multi-issue negotiation, it involves inferring the relative importance that the opponent assigns to each issue under discussion, which is crucial for finding high-value deals. |
| Approach: | They propose a ranker for inferring the priority order of the opponent from partial dialogues without needing additional annotations for training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better than baselines while accessing fewer utterances from the opponent. |