What to bid and when to stop

Negotiation is an important activity in human society, and is studied by various disciplines, ranging from economics and game theory, to electronic commerce, social psychology, and artificial intelligence. Traditionally, negotiation is a necessary, but also time-consuming and expensive activity. Therefore, in the last decades there has been a large interest in the automation of negotiation, for example in the setting of e-commerce. This interest is fueled by the promise of automated agents eventually being able to negotiate on behalf of human negotiators.Every year, automated negotiation agents are improving in various ways, and there is now a large body of negotiation strategies available, all with their unique strengths and weaknesses. For example, some agents are able to predict the opponent's preferences very well, while others focus more on having a sophisticated bidding strategy. The problem however, is that there is little incremental improvement in agent design, as the agents are tested in varying negotiation settings, using a diverse set of performance measures. This makes it very difficult to meaningfully compare the agents, let alone their underlying techniques. As a result, we lack a reliable way to pinpoint the most effective components in a negotiating agent.There are two major advantages of distinguishing between the different components of a negotiating agent's strategy: first, it allows the study of the behavior and performance of the components in isolation. For example, it becomes possible to compare the preference learning component of all agents, and to identify the best among them. Second, we can proceed to mix and match different components to create new negotiation strategies., e.g.: replacing the preference learning technique of an agent and then examining whether this makes a difference. Such a procedure enables us to combine the individual components to systematically explore the space of possible negotiation strategies.To develop a compositional approach to evaluate and combine the components, we identify structure in most agent designs by introducing the BOA architecture, in which we can develop and integrate the different components of a negotiating agent. We identify three main components of a general negotiation strategy; namely a bidding strategy (B), possibly an opponent model (O), and an acceptance strategy (A). The bidding strategy considers what concessions it deems appropriate given its own preferences, and takes the opponent into account by using an opponent model. The acceptance strategy decides whether offers proposed by the opponent should be accepted.The BOA architecture is integrated into a generic negotiation environment called Genius, which is a software environment for designing and evaluating negotiation strategies. To explore the negotiation strategy space of the negotiation research community, we amend the Genius repository with various existing agents and scenarios from literature. Additionally, we organize a yearly international negotiation competition (ANAC) to harvest even more strategies and scenarios. ANAC also acts as an evaluation tool for negotiation strategies, and encourages the design of negotiation strategies and scenarios.We re-implement agents from literature and ANAC and decouple them to fit into the BOA architecture without introducing any changes in their behavior. For each of the three components, we manage to find and analyze the best ones for specific cases, as described below. We show that the BOA framework leads to significant improvements in agent design by wining ANAC 2013, which had 19 participating teams from 8 international institutions, with an agent that is designed using the BOA framework and is informed by a preliminary analysis of the different components.In every negotiation, one of the negotiating parties must accept an offer to reach an agreement. Therefore, it is important that a negotiator employs a proficient mechanism to decide under which conditions to accept. When contemplating whether to accept an offer, the agent is faced with the acceptance dilemma: accepting the offer may be suboptimal, as better offers may still be presented before time runs out. On the other hand, accepting too late may prevent an agreement from being reached, resulting in a break off with no gain for either party. We classify and compare state-of-the-art generic acceptance conditions. We propose new acceptance strategies and we demonstrate that they outperform the other conditions. We also provide insight into why some conditions work better than others and investigate correlations between the properties of the negotiation scenario and the efficacy of acceptance conditions.Later, we adopt a more principled approach by applying optimal stopping theory to calculate the optimal decision on the acceptance of an offer. We approach the decision of whether to accept as a sequential decision problem, by modeling the bids received as a stochastic process. We determine the optimal acceptance policies for particular opponent classes and we present an approach to estimate the expected range of offers when the type of opponent is unknown. We show that the proposed approach is able to find the optimal time to accept, and improves upon all existing acceptance strategies.Another principal component of a negotiating agent's strategy is its ability to take the opponent's preferences into account. The quality of an opponent model can be measured in two different ways. One is to use the agent's performance as a benchmark for the model's quality. We evaluate and compare the performance of a selection of state-of-the-art opponent modeling techniques in negotiation. We provide an overview of the factors influencing the quality of a model and we analyze how the performance of opponent models depends on the negotiation setting. We identify a class of simple and surprisingly effective opponent modeling techniques that did not receive much previous attention in literature.The other way to measure the quality of an opponent model is to directly evaluate its accuracy by using similarity measures. We review all methods to measure the accuracy of an opponent model and we then analyze how changes in accuracy translate into performance differences. Moreover, we pinpoint the best predictors for good performance. This leads to new insights concerning how to construct an opponent model, and what we need to measure when optimizing performance.Finally, we take two different approaches to gain more insight into effective bidding strategies. We present a new classification method for negotiation strategies, based on their pattern of concession making against different kinds of opponents. We apply this technique to classify some well-known negotiating strategies, and we formulate guidelines on how agents should bid in order to be successful, which gives insight into the bidding strategy space of negotiating agents. Furthermore, we apply optimal stopping theory again, this time to find the concessions that maximize utility for the bidder against particular opponents. We show there is an interesting connection between optimal bidding and optimal acceptance strategies, in the sense that they are mirrored versions of each other.Lastly, after analyzing all components separately, we put the pieces back together again. We take all BOA components accumulated so far, including the best ones, and combine them all together to explore the space of negotiation strategies.We compute the contribution of each component to the overall negotiation result, and we study the interaction between components. We find that combining the best agent components indeed makes the strongest agents. This shows that the component-based view of the BOA architecture not only provides a useful basis for developing negotiating agents but also provides a useful analytical tool. By varying the BOA components we are able to demonstrate the contribution of each component to the negotiation result, and thus analyze the significance of each. The bidding strategy is by far the most important to consider, followed by the acceptance conditions and finally followed by the opponent model.Our results validate the analytical approach of the BOA framework to first optimize the individual components, and then to recombine them into a negotiating agent

Automatic extraction of agendas for action from news coverage of violent conflict

Words can make people act. Indeed, a simple phrase ‘Will you, please, open the window?’ can cause a person to do so. However, does this still hold, if the request is communicated indirectly via mass media and addresses a large group of people? Different disciplines have approached this problem from different angles, showing that there is indeed a connection between what is being called for in media and what people do. This dissertation, being an interdisciplinary work, bridges different perspectives on the problem and explains how collective mobilisation happens, using the novel term ‘agenda for action’. It also shows how agendas for action can be extracted from text in automated fashion using computational linguistics and machine learning. To demonstrate the potential of agenda for action, the analysis of The NYT and The Guardian coverage of chemical weapons crises in Syria in 2013 is performed. Katsiaryna Stalpouskaya has always been interested in applied and computational linguistics. Pursuing this interest, she joined FP7 EU-INFOCORE project in 2014, where she was responsible for automated content analysis. Katsiaryna’s work on the project resulted in a PhD thesis, which she successfully defended at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München in 2019. Currently, she is working as a product owner in the field of text and data analysis

Automatic extraction of agendas for action from news coverage of violent conflict

Words can make people act. Indeed, a simple phrase ‘Will you, please, open the window?’ can cause a person to do so. However, does this still hold, if the request is communicated indirectly via mass media and addresses a large group of people? Different disciplines have approached this problem from different angles, showing that there is indeed a connection between what is being called for in media and what people do. This dissertation, being an interdisciplinary work, bridges different perspectives on the problem and explains how collective mobilisation happens, using the novel term ‘agenda for action’. It also shows how agendas for action can be extracted from text in automated fashion using computational linguistics and machine learning. To demonstrate the potential of agenda for action, the analysis of The NYT and The Guardian coverage of chemical weapons crises in Syria in 2013 is performed. Katsiaryna Stalpouskaya has always been interested in applied and computational linguistics. Pursuing this interest, she joined FP7 EU-INFOCORE project in 2014, where she was responsible for automated content analysis. Katsiaryna’s work on the project resulted in a PhD thesis, which she successfully defended at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München in 2019. Currently, she is working as a product owner in the field of text and data analysis

Multi-Agent Systems

A multi-agent system (MAS) is a system composed of multiple interacting intelligent agents. Multi-agent systems can be used to solve problems which are difficult or impossible for an individual agent or monolithic system to solve. Agent systems are open and extensible systems that allow for the deployment of autonomous and proactive software components. Multi-agent systems have been brought up and used in several application domains

Translations and Participation: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives

In an era of heightened global interconnectedness and cultural exchange, social cleavages and dynamics of alienation become increasingly apparent. This necessitates a closer look at the intricate relationship between translations and participations as they unfold together. The contributors to this volume spark a cross-disciplinary dialogue on the interdependencies between translational practices - lingustic as well as cultural - and social participation. Authors from diverse fields, including interpreting, translation and education research as well as anthropology and sociology, share their perspectives on this vital yet often overlooked issue

Plural Rationality and Interactive Decision Processes; Proceedings of an IIASA Summer Study on Plural Rationality and Interactive Decision Processes, Sopron, Hungary, August 16-26, 1984

These Proceedings report the scientific results of the Summer Study on Plural Rationality and Interactive Decision Processes organized jointly by IIASA and the Hungarian Committee for Applied Systems Analysis. Sixty-eight researchers from sixteen countries participated, most of them contributing papers or experiments. The Study gathered specialists from many disciplines, from philosophy and cultural anthropology, through decision theory, game theory and economics, to engineering and applied mathematics. Twenty-eight of the papers presented during the Study are included in this volume

Preference extraction and reasoning in negotiation dialogues

Modéliser les préférences des utilisateurs est incontournable dans de nombreux problèmes de la vie courante, que ce soit pour la prise de décision individuelle ou collective ou le raisonnement stratégique par exemple. Cependant, il n'est pas facile de travailler avec les préférences. Comme les agents ne connaissent pas complètement leurs préférences à l'avance, nous avons seulement deux moyens de les déterminer pour pouvoir raisonner ensuite : nous pouvons les inférer soit de ce que les agents disent, soit de leurs actions non-linguistiques. Plusieurs méthodes ont été proposées en Intelligence Artificielle pour apprendre les préférences à partir d'actions non-linguistiques mais à notre connaissance très peu de travaux ont étudié comment éliciter efficacement les préférences verbalisées par les utilisateurs grâce à des méthodes de Traitement Automatique des Langues (TAL).Dans ce travail, nous proposons une nouvelle approche pour extraire et raisonner sur les préférences exprimées dans des dialogues de négociation. Après avoir extrait les préférences de chaque tour de dialogue, nous utilisons la structure discursive pour suivre leur évolution au fur et à mesure de la conversation. Nous utilisons les CP-nets, un modèle de représentation des préférences, pour formaliser et raisonner sur ces préférences extraites. Cette méthode est d'abord évaluée sur différents corpus de négociation pour lesquels les résultats montrent que la méthode est prometteuse. Nous l'appliquons ensuite dans sa globalité avec des raisonnements issus de la Théorie des Jeux pour prédire les échanges effectués, ou non, dans le jeu de marchandage Les Colons de Catane. Les résultats obtenus montrent des prédictions significativement meilleures que celles de quatre baselines qui ne gèrent pas correctement le raisonnement stratégique. Cette thèse présente donc une nouvelle approche à la croisée de plusieurs domaines : le Traitement Automatique des Langues (pour l'extraction automatique des préférences et le raisonnement sur leur verbalisation), l'Intelligence Artificielle (pour la modélisation et le raisonnement sur les préférences extraites) et la Théorie des Jeux (pour la prédiction des actions stratégiques dans un jeu de marchandage)Modelling user preferences is crucial in many real-life problems, ranging from individual and collective decision-making to strategic interactions between agents for example. But handling preferences is not easy. Since agents don't come with their preferences transparently given in advance, we have only two means to determine what they are if we wish to exploit them in reasoning: we can infer them from what an agent says or from his nonlinguistic actions. Preference acquisition from nonlinguistic actions has been wildly studied within the Artificial Intelligence community. However, to our knowledge, there has been little work that has so far investigated how preferences can be efficiently elicited from users using Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques. In this work, we propose a new approach to extract and reason on preferences expressed in negotiation dialogues. After having extracted the preferences expressed in each dialogue turn, we use the discursive structure to follow their evolution as the dialogue progresses. We use CP-nets, a model used for the representation of preferences, to formalize and reason about these extracted preferences. The method is first evaluated on different negotiation corpora for which we obtain promising results. We then apply the end-to-end method with principles from Game Theory to predict trades in the win-lose game The Settlers of Catan. Our method shows good results, beating baselines that don't adequately track or reason about preferences. This work thus presents a new approach at the intersection of several research domains: Natural Language Processing (for the automatic preference extraction and the reasoning on their verbalisation), Artificial Intelligence (for the modelling and reasoning on the extracted preferences) and Game Theory (for strategic action prediction in a bargaining game