Team

Summary

This project builds upon the experience gained in analysing data collected from the Inspire e-negotiation system to determine the relationships between user characteristics, the negotiation process and its outcomes. The Inspire ENS has been used in teaching and training since 1996. To date we have collected data from over 5,000 users from 40 countries. This project will examine qualitative, qualita-tive and text data collected from the Inspire negotiations. Exploratory research has already uncovered several relationships between culture, gender and other users’ characteristics, and the use of the ENS, e-negotiation process and outcomes. These influences will be studied now with the complete dataset and with the text, the latter using both methods coming from natural language processing and the qualitative research. Lexical and semantic models of the domain will be formulated to study how the negotiators' language skills affect their performance. To validate the models and to show how the re-sults may be generalized, they will be applied to other ENSs, such as Negoisst, for possible adapta-tions and reassessments. The preliminary studies also indicated the necessity to re-design and better validate the measurement and analysis instruments used. These instruments will be used in the ex-periments with Inspire and other ENSs.

Key activities

1. Build tools to extract and categorize the textual elements of the Inspire negotiation tran-scripts.
2. Organize textual elements into a morphologically tagged corpus; link individual texts to ne-gotiation histories; construct a domain model and ontology, and a domain-specific semantic lexicon.
3. Development and initial empirical analysis of a model for the assessment of web-based sup-port systems (AMIS) based on existing Inspire data.
4. Design and build a dedicated syntactic analyzer (or adapt an existing analyzer) and apply it to the corpus.
5. Study of the social, cultural, gender and other user characteristics on the e-negotiation proc-ess and outcomes and the use of Inspire.
6. Re-design and validation of measurement instruments for user characteristics, user attitudes and negotiation processes.
7. Development of a consistent framework for the statistical analysis of negotiation data.
8. Classify segments of texts by relevance to the underlying history; identify references to negotiation steps.
9. Classify negotiation utterances into speech-act based communication types; identify refer-ences to negotiation steps and the resulting effects such as obligations.
10. E-negotiation controlled experiments with the Inspire and Negoisst systems.
11. Propose a preliminary catalogue of phrases associated with winning, losing and abandoning negotiation.