A recent trend in the domain of open-domain conversational agents is enabling them to converse empathetically to emotional prompts. Current approaches either follow an end-to-end approach or condition the responses on similar emotion labels to generate empathetic responses. But empathy is a broad concept that refers to the cognitive and emotional reactions of an individual to the observed experiences of another and it is more complex than mere mimicry of emotion. Hence, it requires identifying complex human conversational strategies and dynamics in addition to generic emotions to control and interpret empathetic responding capabilities of chatbots. In this work, we make use of a taxonomy of eight empathetic response intents in addition to generic emotion categories in building a dialogue response generation model capable of generating empathetic responses in a controllable and interpretable manner. It consists of two modules: 1) a response emotion/intent prediction module; and 2) a response generation module. We propose several rule-based and neural approaches to predict the next response's emotion/intent and generate responses conditioned on these predicted emotions/intents. Automatic and human evaluation results emphasize the importance of the use of the taxonomy of empathetic response intents in producing more diverse and empathetically more appropriate responses than end-to-end models.
Empathy Level Alignment via Reinforcement Learning for Empathetic Response Generation
School of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Hefei University of Technology（合肥工业大学计算机与信息工程学院）；School of Computer Science and Technology, Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学计算机科学与技术学院）
A key trait of daily conversations between individuals is the ability to express empathy towards others, and exploring ways to implement empathy is a crucial step towards human-like dialogue systems. Previous approaches on this topic mainly focus on detecting and utilizing the user's emotion for generating empathetic responses. However, since empathy includes both aspects of affection and cognition, we argue that in addition to identifying the user's emotion, cognitive understanding of the user's situation should also be considered. To this end, we propose a novel approach for empathetic respo…
The capacity of empathy is crucial to the success of open-domain dialog systems. Due to its nature of multi-dimensionality, there are various factors that relate to empathy expression, such as communication mechanism, dialog act and emotion. However, existing methods for empathetic response generation usually either consider only one empathy factor or ignore the hierarchical relationships between different factors, leading to a weak ability of empathy modeling. In this paper, we propose a multi-factor hierarchical framework, CoMAE, for empathetic response generation, which models the above thr…
Previous research on empathetic dialogue systems has mostly focused on generating responses given certain emotions. However, being empathetic not only requires the ability of generating emotional responses, but more importantly, requires the understanding of user emotions and replying appropriately. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end approach for modeling empathy in dialogue systems: Mixture of Empathetic Listeners (MoEL). Our model first captures the user emotions and outputs an emotion distribution. Based on this, MoEL will softly combine the output states of the appropriate Listen…
Do You Understand How I Feel?: Towards Verified Empathy in Therapy Chatbots
Université Paris-Saclay, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique（巴黎萨克雷大学，法国国家科学研究中心）；TU Wien（维也纳技术大学）；Politecnico di Milano（米兰理工学院）；Karlsruhe Institute of Technology（卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院）
CTSM: Combining Trait and State Emotions for Empathetic Response Model
College of Computer and Data Science, Fuzhou University（福州大学计算机与数据科学学院）；Digital Fujian Institute of Financial Big Data（数字福建金融大数据研究院）；School of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen)（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳）计算机科学与技术学院）
STRIDE-ED: A Strategy-Grounded Stepwise Reasoning Framework for Empathetic Dialogue Systems
School of Artificial Intelligence, OPtics and ElectroNics (iOPEN), Northwestern Polytechnical University, China（人工智能学院、光学与电子学（iOPEN）、西北工业大学，中国）；School of Artificial Intelligence and Big Data, Henan University of Technology, China（人工智能与大数据学院、河南理工大学，中国）；School of Computer Science, Northwestern Polytechnical University, China（计算机学院、西北工业大学，中国）
School of Computer and Communication Sciences（计算机与通信科学学院）；École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne（洛桑联邦理工学院）
Open-domain conversational agents or chatbots are becoming increasingly popular in the natural language processing community. One of the challenges is enabling them to converse in an empathetic manner. Current neural response generation methods rely solely on end-to-end learning from large scale conversation data to generate dialogues. This approach can produce socially unacceptable responses due to the lack of large-scale quality data used to train the neural models. However, recent work has shown the promise of combining dialogue act/intent modelling and neural response generation. This hybr…
Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University（清华大学深圳国际研究生院）
In empathetic conversations, humans express their empathy to others with empathetic intents. However, most existing empathetic conversational methods suffer from a lack of empathetic intents, which leads to monotonous empathy. To address the bias of the empathetic intents distribution between empathetic dialogue models and humans, we propose a novel model to generate empathetic responses with human-consistent empathetic intents, EmpHi for short. Precisely, EmpHi learns the distribution of potential empathetic intents with a discrete latent variable, then combines both implicit and explicit int…
Large pre-trained neural language models have supported the effectiveness of many NLP tasks, yet are still prone to generating toxic language hindering the safety of their use. Using empathetic data, we improve over recent work on controllable text generation that aims to reduce the toxicity of generated text. We find we are able to dramatically reduce the size of fine-tuning data to 7.5-30k samples while at the same time making significant improvements over state-of-the-art toxicity mitigation of up to 3.4% absolute reduction (26% relative) from the original work on 2.3m samples, by strategic…
APTNESS: Incorporating Appraisal Theory and Emotion Support Strategies for Empathetic Response Generation
Sun Yat-Sen University（中山大学）；Shenzhen MSU-BIT University（深圳北理莫斯科大学）；Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院）
It may be difficult for some individuals to open up and share their thoughts and feelings in front of a mental health expert. For those who are more at ease with a virtual agent, conversational agents can serve as an intermediate step in the right direction. The conversational agent must therefore be empathetic and able to conduct free-flowing conversations. To this effect, we present an approach for creating a generative empathetic open-domain chatbot that can be used for mental health applications. We leverage large scale pre-training and empathetic conversational data to make the responses …
Singapore University of Technology and Design（新加坡科技设计大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Instituto Politécnico Nacional（国立理工学院）；University of Michigan（密歇根大学）
The majority of existing methods for empathetic response generation rely on the emotion of the context to generate empathetic responses. However, empathy is much more than generating responses with an appropriate emotion. It also often entails subtle expressions of understanding and personal resonance with the situation of the other interlocutor. Unfortunately, such qualities are difficult to quantify and the datasets lack the relevant annotations. To address this issue, in this paper we propose an approach that relies on exemplars to cue the generative model on fine stylistic properties that …
Existing emotion-aware conversational models usually focus on controlling the response contents to align with a specific emotion class, whereas empathy is the ability to understand and concern the feelings and experience of others. Hence, it is critical to learn the causes that evoke the users' emotion for empathetic responding, a.k.a. emotion causes. To gather emotion causes in online environments, we leverage counseling strategies and develop an empathetic chatbot to utilize the causal emotion information. On a real-world online dataset, we verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach b…
National Technical University of Athens（雅典国家技术大学）；ATHENA R.C.（雅典娜研究中心）；Behavioral Signals
In this paper, we introduce EmpBot: an end-to-end empathetic chatbot. Empathetic conversational agents should not only understand what is being discussed, but also acknowledge the implied feelings of the conversation partner and respond appropriately. To this end, we propose a method based on a transformer pretrained language model (T5). Specifically, during finetuning we propose to use three objectives: response language modeling, sentiment understanding, and empathy forcing. The first objective is crucial for generating relevant and coherent responses, while the next ones are significant for…
Pattern Recognition Center, WeChat AI, Tencent Inc（腾讯公司微信人工智能模式识别中心）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Previous researches on dialogue system assessment usually focus on the quality evaluation (e.g. fluency, relevance, etc) of responses generated by the chatbots, which are local and technical metrics. For a chatbot which responds to millions of online users including minors, we argue that it should have a healthy mental tendency in order to avoid the negative psychological impact on them. In this paper, we establish several mental health assessment dimensions for chatbots (depression, anxiety, alcohol addiction, empathy) and introduce the questionnaire-based mental health assessment methods. We…
Philips Research（飞利浦研究院）；University of Cagliari（卡利亚里大学）
Empathetic response from the therapist is key to the success of clinical psychotherapy, especially motivational interviewing. Previous work on computational modelling of empathy in motivational interviewing has focused on offline, session-level assessment of therapist empathy, where empathy captures all efforts that the therapist makes to understand the client's perspective and convey that understanding to the client. In this position paper, we propose a novel task of turn-level detection of client need for empathy. Concretely, we propose to leverage pre-trained language models and empathy-rel…
DiffusEmp: A Diffusion Model-Based Framework with Multi-Grained Control for Empathetic Response Generation
Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院信息工程研究所）；School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学网络空间安全学院）；JD AI Research（京东人工智能研究院）
Synth-Empathy: Towards High-Quality Synthetic Empathy Data
Peking University（北京大学）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Shanghai AI Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）；Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院信息工程研究所）
Suzhou Fubian Medical Technology Co., Ltd.（苏州富边医疗科技有限公司）
Expressing empathy is important in everyday conversations, and exploring how empathy arises is crucial in automatic response generation. Most previous approaches consider only a single factor that affects empathy. However, in practice, empathy generation and expression is a very complex and dynamic psychological process. A listener needs to find out events which cause a speaker's emotions (emotion cause extraction), project the events into some experience (knowledge extension), and express empathy in the most appropriate way (communication mechanism). To this end, we propose a novel approach, …
Apart from the coherence and fluency of responses, an empathetic chatbot emphasizes more on people's feelings. By considering altruistic behaviors between human interaction, empathetic chatbots enable people to get a better interactive and supportive experience. This study presents a framework whereby several empathetic chatbots are based on understanding users' implied feelings and replying empathetically for multiple dialogue turns. We call these chatbots CheerBots. CheerBots can be retrieval-based or generative-based and were finetuned by deep reinforcement learning. To respond in an empath…
Center for Artificial Intelligence Research (CAiRE)（人工智能研究中心（CAiRE））；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
An important aspect of human conversation difficult for machines is conversing with empathy, which is to understand the user's emotion and respond appropriately. Recent neural conversation models that attempted to generate empathetic responses either focused on conditioning the output to a given emotion, or incorporating the current user emotional state. However, these approaches do not factor in how the user would feel towards the generated response. Hence, in this paper, we propose Sentiment Look-ahead, which is a novel perspective for empathy that models the future user emotional state. In …
Customer service is a setting that calls for empathy in live human agent responses. Recent advances have demonstrated how open-domain chatbots can be trained to demonstrate empathy when responding to live human utterances. We show that a blended skills chatbot model that responds to customer queries is more likely to resemble actual human agent response if it is trained to recognize emotion and exhibit appropriate empathy, than a model without such training. For our analysis, we leverage a Twitter customer service dataset containing several million customer<->agent dialog examples in customer …
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；EMOS Technologies Inc.（EMOS科技公司）
In this paper, we present an end-to-end empathetic conversation agent CAiRE. Our system adapts TransferTransfo (Wolf et al., 2019) learning approach that fine-tunes a large-scale pre-trained language model with multi-task objectives: response language modeling, response prediction and dialogue emotion detection. We evaluate our model on the recently proposed empathetic-dialogues dataset (Rashkin et al., 2019), the experiment results show that CAiRE achieves state-of-the-art performance on dialogue emotion detection and empathetic response generation.
Generative adversarial imitation learning (GAIL) is a model-free algorithm that has been shown to provide strong results in imitating complex behaviors in high-dimensional environments. In this paper, we utilize the GAIL model for text generation to develop empathy-based context-aware conversational AI. Our model uses an expert trajectory of empathetic prompt-response dialogues which can accurately exhibit the correct empathetic emotion when generating a response. The Generator of the GAIL model uses the GPT-2 sequential pre-trained language model trained on 117 million parameters from 40 GB o…
FreezeEmpath: Efficient Training for Empathetic Spoken Chatbots with Frozen LLMs
Key Laboratory of Intelligent Information Processing, Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（智能信息处理重点实验室，计算技术研究所，中国科学院）；State Key Laboratory of AI Safety, Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（人工智能安全国家重点实验室，计算技术研究所，中国科学院）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China（中国科学院大学，北京，中国）
Efficient-Empathy: Towards Efficient and Effective Selection of Empathy Data
Peking University（北京大学）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院信息工程研究所）
This paper describes the development of Microsoft XiaoIce, the most popular social chatbot in the world. XiaoIce is uniquely designed as an AI companion with an emotional connection to satisfy the human need for communication, affection, and social belonging. We take into account both intelligent quotient (IQ) and emotional quotient (EQ) in system design, cast human-machine social chat as decision-making over Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), and optimize XiaoIce for long-term user engagement, measured in expected Conversation-turns Per Session (CPS). We detail the system architecture and key …
Alibaba-NTU Singapore Joint Research Institute（阿里巴巴-南洋理工大学新加坡联合研究院）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）
Empathetic conversational models have been shown to improve user satisfaction and task outcomes in numerous domains. In Psychology, persona has been shown to be highly correlated to personality, which in turn influences empathy. In addition, our empirical analysis also suggests that persona plays an important role in empathetic conversations. To this end, we propose a new task towards persona-based empathetic conversations and present the first empirical study on the impact of persona on empathetic responding. Specifically, we first present a novel large-scale multi-domain dataset for persona-…
CASE: Aligning Coarse-to-Fine Cognition and Affection for Empathetic Response Generation
Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology（北京信息科学与技术国家研究中心）；College of Intelligence and Computing, Tianjin University（天津大学智能与计算学部）
