# Keeping Up Appearances: Computational Modeling of Face Acts in Persuasion Oriented Discussions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.10815 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.10815/

## Key facts

- Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 22 Sep 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Let's Negotiate! A Survey of Negotiation Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09072/) (2022)
- [DialoGraph: Incorporating Interpretable Strategy-Graph Networks into Negotiation Dialogues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.00920/) (2021)
- [SocialDial: A Benchmark for Socially-Aware Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12026/) (2023)
- [RESPER: Computationally Modelling Resisting Strategies in Persuasive Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.10545/) (2021)
- [Social Influence Dialogue Systems: A Survey of Datasets and Models For Social Influence Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05664/) (2022)
- [RENOVI: A Benchmark Towards Remediating Norm Violations in Socio-Cultural Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11178/) (2024)
- [Must Read: A Comprehensive Survey of Computational Persuasion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.07775/) (2025)
- [The Future of Cognitive Strategy-enhanced Persuasive Dialogue Agents: New Perspectives and Trends](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04631/) (2024)
- [Leveraging Machine-Generated Rationales to Facilitate Social Meaning Detection in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19545/) (2024)
- [Let's Negotiate! A Survey of Negotiation Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01097/) (2024)
- [Intention and Face in Dialog](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04109/) (2024)
- [Examining Gender and Power on Wikipedia Through Face and Politeness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02798/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The notion of face refers to the public self-image of an individual that emerges both from the individual's own actions as well as from the interaction with others. Modeling face and understanding its state changes throughout a conversation is critical to the study of maintenance of basic human needs in and through interaction. Grounded in the politeness theory of Brown and Levinson (1978), we propose a generalized framework for modeling face acts in persuasion conversations, resulting in a reliable coding manual, an annotated corpus, and computational models. The framework reveals insights about differences in face act utilization between asymmetric roles in persuasion conversations. Using computational models, we are able to successfully identify face acts as well as predict a key conversational outcome (e.g. donation success). Finally, we model a latent representation of the conversational state to analyze the impact of predicted face acts on the probability of a positive conversational outcome and observe several correlations that corroborate previous findings.