An Agent Architecture for Concurrent Bilateral Negotiations

Abstract. We present an architecture that makes use of symbolic decision-making to support agents participating in concurrent bilateral negotiations. The architecture is a revised version of previous work with the KGP model [23, 12], which we specialise with knowledge about the agent’s self, the negotiation opponents and the environment. Our work combines the specification of domain-independent decision-making with a new protocol for concurrent negotiation that revisits the well-known alternating offers protocol [22]. We show how the decision-making can be specialised to represent the agent’s strategies, utilities and prefer-ences using a Prolog-like meta-program. The work prepares the ground for supporting decision-making in concurrent bilateral negotiations that is more lightweight than previous work and contributes towards a fully developed model of the architecture

Comparing Neural Networks for Speech Emotion Recognition in Customer Service Interactions

Automatic speech emotion recognition (SER) may assist call center service employees in deciphering and regulating customer emotions. In order to contribute to a successful augmentation of service employees with AI, the main goal of this study is to identify effective machine learning approaches to classify discrete basic emotions in customer service conversations. A comparison is presented of the recognition performance of different neural network architectures on speech features extracted from service interactions in a naturalistic customer service setting. Baseline classifiers, including a zerorule classifier, a random classifier, a frequency classifier, and nonsequential multi-class classifiers are compared to different neural network architectures. A multi-layer perceptron (MLP), a one-dimensional convolutional neural network (CNN), and a neural machine translation (NMT) outperform the baseline classifiers, suggesting a pattern in the data relating to emotion labels. While the neural machine translation model with attention attains the highest f1-score, no significant difference in performance among the neural networks is detected. Results therefore support the use of the the multi-label multi-layer perceptron as the simplest model

The Effect of Emotional Cues on Making Economic Decisions under Uncertainty

We investigate the understudied role of emotions on investors’ decision. Specifically, we identify six basic human emotions (i.e. happiness, sadness, surprise, fear, anger, and disgust) expressed by S&P 500 CEOs during their earning conference calls and examine their effects on financial analysts’ decisions (i.e. retain, buy or sell shares). To identify CEOs' emotions in more than 500 calls we developed a deep learning algorithm trained by experts annotating vocal data in a subset of calls. Our findings shed light on underlying emotional mechanisms of financial decision-making under uncertainty, thereby contributing to behavioral economic theory

Semantic Correlation Graph Embedding

Many data sets include categorical features in the form of nominal and ordinal features. However, most machine learning algorithms cannot deal with categorical features directly because they require numerical input features. Categorical embeddings are an effective approach to converting categorical features into numerical vectors. This work proposes a novel embedding approach, called Semantic Correlation Graph Embedding, to create embeddings from knowledge graphs. The approach constructs a semantic correlation graph of triplets among the categorical features to learn numerical embeddings. Our approach aims to uncover relationships taking place in categorical data in terms of low-level knowledge and semantics that may help group the features of the data sets under semantic entities. Three distinct embedding models are proposed according to how the graph is constructed. The results are evaluated with two public data sets. They show that the learned embeddings produce a statistically significant improvement in the performance of the classification tasks in terms of AUC, F1 score, precision, and recall