SELF-PERCEPT: Introspection Improves Large Language Models' Detection of Multi-Person Mental Manipulation in Conversations

Mental manipulation is a subtle yet pervasive form of abuse in interpersonal communication, making its detection critical for safeguarding potential victims. However, due to manipulation's nuanced and context-specific nature, identifying manipulative language in complex, multi-turn, and multi-person conversations remains a significant challenge for large language models (LLMs). To address this gap, we introduce the MultiManip dataset, comprising 220 multi-turn, multi-person dialogues balanced between manipulative and non-manipulative interactions, all drawn from reality shows that mimic real-world scenarios. For manipulative interactions, it includes 11 distinct manipulations depicting real-life scenarios. We conduct extensive evaluations of state-of-the-art LLMs, such as GPT-4o and Llama-3.1-8B, employing various prompting strategies. Despite their capabilities, these models often struggle to detect manipulation effectively. To overcome this limitation, we propose SELF-PERCEPT, a novel, two-stage prompting framework inspired by Self-Perception Theory, demonstrating strong performance in detecting multi-person, multi-turn mental manipulation. Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/danushkhanna/self-percept .

Unsupervised paradigm for information extraction from transcripts using BERT

Audio call transcripts are one of the valuable sources of information for multiple downstream use cases such as understanding the voice of the customer and analyzing agent performance. However, these transcripts are noisy in nature and in an industry setting, getting tagged ground truth data is a challenge. In this paper, we present a solution implemented in the industry using BERT Language Models as part of our pipeline to extract key topics and multiple open intents discussed in the call. Another problem statement we looked at was the automatic tagging of transcripts into predefined categories, which traditionally is solved using supervised approach. To overcome the lack of tagged data, all our proposed approaches use unsupervised methods to solve the outlined problems. We evaluate the results by quantitatively comparing the automatically extracted topics, intents and tagged categories with human tagged ground truth and by qualitatively measuring the valuable concepts and intents that are not present in the ground truth. We achieved near human accuracy in extraction of these topics and intents using our novel approach