# Zero-shot Persuasive Chatbots with LLM-Generated Strategies and Information Retrieval

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.03585 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03585/

## Key facts

- Cited by 14 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 64 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Language Models as Knowledge Bases?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01066/) (2019)
- [FEVER: a large-scale dataset for Fact Extraction and VERification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05355/) (2018)
- [Interleaving Retrieval with Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Knowledge-Intensive Multi-Step Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10509/) (2022)
- [A Multitask, Multilingual, Multimodal Evaluation of ChatGPT on Reasoning, Hallucination, and Interactivity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04023/) (2023)
- [Personalizing Dialogue Agents: I have a dog, do you have pets too?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07243/) (2018)
- [How Much Knowledge Can You Pack Into the Parameters of a Language Model?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08910/) (2020)
- [Wizard of Wikipedia: Knowledge-Powered Conversational agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.01241/) (2018)
- [ColBERTv2: Effective and Efficient Retrieval via Lightweight Late Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01488/) (2021)
- [Check Your Facts and Try Again: Improving Large Language Models with External Knowledge and Automated Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12813/) (2023)
- [RARR: Researching and Revising What Language Models Say, Using Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08726/) (2022)
- [Deal or No Deal? End-to-End Learning for Negotiation Dialogues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05125/) (2017)
- [Persuasion for Good: Towards a Personalized Persuasive Dialogue System for Social Good](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.06725/) (2019)
- [CoSQL: A Conversational Text-to-SQL Challenge Towards Cross-Domain Natural Language Interfaces to Databases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05378/) (2019)
- [Towards Deep Conversational Recommendations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07617/) (2018)
- [Decoupling Strategy and Generation in Negotiation Dialogues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.09637/) (2018)
- [MedDialog: Two Large-scale Medical Dialogue Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.03329/) (2020)
- [Faithful to the Original: Fact Aware Neural Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.04434/) (2017)
- [Conversational Recommender System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03277/) (2018)
- [Don't Say That! Making Inconsistent Dialogue Unlikely with Unlikelihood Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.03860/) (2019)
- [Neural Path Hunter: Reducing Hallucination in Dialogue Systems via Path Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08455/) (2021)
- [You Impress Me: Dialogue Generation via Mutual Persona Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05388/) (2020)
- [Increasing Faithfulness in Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue with Controllable Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06963/) (2021)
- [WikiChat: Stopping the Hallucination of Large Language Model Chatbots by Few-Shot Grounding on Wikipedia](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14292/) (2023)
- [Controllable Dialogue Simulation with In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04185/) (2022)
- [Controllable Mixed-Initiative Dialogue Generation through Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04147/) (2023)
- [Effects of Persuasive Dialogues: Testing Bot Identities and Inquiry Strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.04564/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Persuasion with Large Language Models: A Survey of Empirical Evidence, Study Methodologies, and Ethical Implications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.06837/) (2024)
- [Persuade Me if You Can: A Framework for Evaluating Persuasion Effectiveness and Susceptibility Among Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01829/) (2025)
- [Must Read: A Comprehensive Survey of Computational Persuasion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.07775/) (2025)
- [ToMAP: Training Opponent-Aware LLM Persuaders with Theory of Mind](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22961/) (2025)
- [Breaking Bad Tokens: Detoxification of LLMs Using Sparse Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14536/) (2025)
- [Persuasion Should be Double-Blind: A Multi-Domain Dialogue Dataset With Faithfulness Based on Causal Theory of Mind](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.21297/) (2025)
- [A Review of Incorporating Psychological Theories in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.00003/) (2025)
- [Mind the Gap! Choice Independence in Using Multilingual LLMs for Persuasive Co-Writing Tasks in Different Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.09532/) (2025)
- [Causal Discovery and Counterfactual Reasoning to Optimize Persuasive Dialogue Policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16544/) (2025)
- [Generative Framework for Personalized Persuasion: Inferring Causal, Counterfactual, and Latent Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13904/) (2025)
- [When AI Gets Persuaded, Humans Follow: Inducing the Conformity Effect in Persuasive Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.04229/) (2025)
- [MA2P: A Meta-Cognitive Autonomous Intelligent Agents Framework for Complex Persuasion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.18572/) (2026)
- [CORTEX: Token-Level Hallucination Detection in RAG via Comparative Internal Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.31033/) (2026)
- [Contextualized Counterspeech Can Be More Persuasive Than Generic Counterspeech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.26236/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Persuasion plays a pivotal role in a wide range of applications from health intervention to the promotion of social good. Persuasive chatbots employed responsibly for social good can be an enabler of positive individual and social change. Existing methods rely on fine-tuning persuasive chatbots with task-specific training data which is costly, if not infeasible, to collect. Furthermore, they employ only a handful of pre-defined persuasion strategies. We propose PersuaBot, a zero-shot chatbot based on Large Language Models (LLMs) that is factual and more persuasive by leveraging many more nuanced strategies. PersuaBot uses an LLM to first generate natural responses, from which the strategies used are extracted. To combat hallucination of LLMs, Persuabot replace any unsubstantiated claims in the response with retrieved facts supporting the extracted strategies. We applied our chatbot, PersuaBot, to three significantly different domains needing persuasion skills: donation solicitation, recommendations, and health intervention. Our experiments on simulated and human conversations show that our zero-shot approach is more persuasive than prior work, while achieving factual accuracy surpassing state-of-the-art knowledge-oriented chatbots.