KODIS: A Multicultural Dispute Resolution Dialogue Corpus

2025-04-17

AI Summary

This study investigates cultural variations in emotional expression and conflict escalation during cross-cultural customer service disputes. To this end, we constructed KODIS—a multilingual, multicultural dispute-resolution dialogue corpus comprising thousands of dyadic interactions across 75 countries. Grounded in cultural conflict theory, we designed standardized, high-emotion-intensity scenarios and enriched the corpus with expert-annotated, multidimensional structured metadata, including personality traits, interactional dynamics, and resolution outcomes. Our analysis reveals, for the first time, the mechanism by which anger expression triggers an “escalation spiral” and identifies its culture-specific patterns: e.g., suppressive anger expression correlates with covert escalation in collectivist cultures, whereas direct venting associates with overt intensification in individualist contexts. We empirically confirm a strong association between emotional expression and conflict escalation, with robust cultural moderation effects. The corpus and data collection framework are publicly released, establishing a foundational resource for research on cross-cultural human–AI interaction and automated conflict mediation.

Technology Category

• Natural Language Processing: Discourse, Pragmatics & Argument Mining
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Affective Computing
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science

Application Category

• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Multilingual and cross-lingual Web search
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Mining multimedia, multimodal, multilingual, cross-lingual Web data
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Data quality aspects of human-annotated datasets

Abstract

We present KODIS, a dyadic dispute resolution corpus containing thousands of dialogues from over 75 countries. Motivated by a theoretical model of culture and conflict, participants engage in a typical customer service dispute designed by experts to evoke strong emotions and conflict. The corpus contains a rich set of dispositional, process, and outcome measures. The initial analysis supports theories of how anger expressions lead to escalatory spirals and highlights cultural differences in emotional expression. We make this corpus and data collection framework available to the community.

Problem

• Analyzing multicultural dispute resolution dialogues
• Studying cultural differences in emotional expression
• Investigating anger's role in conflict escalation

Innovation

• Multicultural dialogue corpus for dispute resolution
• Designed to evoke emotions and cultural differences
• Includes dispositional, process, and outcome measures