情感在人类交流中不可或缺，但在任务导向对话（ToD）建模中却常常被忽视，因为此类建模主要关注任务成功率。虽然已有研究在某些ToD任务中探索了用户情感或类似概念，但迄今为止尚无工作将情感建模纳入一个完整的ToD系统，也未曾与人类或模拟用户进行交互。在本工作中，我们将情感纳入完整的ToD处理循环，涵盖理解、管理与生成。为此，我们在EmoWOZ数据集（Feng et al., 2022）的基础上扩展了系统情感行为标签。通过涉及模拟用户和人类用户的交互实验，我们证明了所提出的框架能够显著提升用户的情感体验以及任务成功率。
英文摘要：
Emotions are indispensable in human communication, but are often overlooked in task-oriented dialogue (ToD) modelling, where the task success is the primary focus. While existing works have explored user emotions or similar concepts in some ToD tasks, none has so far included emotion modelling into a fully-fledged ToD system nor conducted interaction with human or simulated users. In this work, we incorporate emotion into the complete ToD processing loop, involving understanding, management, and generation. To this end, we extend the EmoWOZ dataset (Feng et al., 2022) with system affective behaviour labels. Through interactive experimentation involving both simulated and human users, we demonstrate that our proposed framework significantly enhances the user's emotional experience as well as the task success.
In communication, a human would recognize the emotion of an interlocutor and respond with an appropriate emotion, such as empathy and comfort. Toward developing a dialogue system with such a human-like ability, we propose a method to build a dialogue corpus annotated with two kinds of emotions. We collect dialogues from Twitter and annotate each utterance with the emotion that a speaker put into the utterance (expressed emotion) and the emotion that a listener felt after listening to the utterance (experienced emotion). We built a dialogue corpus in Japanese using this method, and its statisti…
The ability to recognise emotions lends a conversational artificial intelligence a human touch. While emotions in chit-chat dialogues have received substantial attention, emotions in task-oriented dialogues remain largely unaddressed. This is despite emotions and dialogue success having equally important roles in a natural system. Existing emotion-annotated task-oriented corpora are limited in size, label richness, and public availability, creating a bottleneck for downstream tasks. To lay a foundation for studies on emotions in task-oriented dialogues, we introduce EmoWOZ, a large-scale manua…
University of Alberta（阿尔伯塔大学）；Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii)（阿尔伯塔机器智能研究所）
Explicitly modeling emotions in dialogue generation has important applications, such as building empathetic personal companions. In this study, we consider the task of expressing a specific emotion for dialogue generation. Previous approaches take the emotion as an input signal, which may be ignored during inference. We instead propose a search-based emotional dialogue system by simulated annealing (SA). Specifically, we first define a scoring function that combines contextual coherence and emotional correctness. Then, SA iteratively edits a general response and searches for a sentence with a …
School of Computer Science and Technology, Shandong University（山东大学计算机科学与技术学院）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯人工智能实验室）；Department of Computer Science, The University of Hong Kong（香港大学计算机科学系）
Lack of external knowledge makes empathetic dialogue systems difficult to perceive implicit emotions and learn emotional interactions from limited dialogue history. To address the above problems, we propose to leverage external knowledge, including commonsense knowledge and emotional lexical knowledge, to explicitly understand and express emotions in empathetic dialogue generation. We first enrich the dialogue history by jointly interacting with external knowledge and construct an emotional context graph. Then we learn emotional context representations from the knowledge-enriched emotional con…
School of Computer Science, Fudan University（复旦大学计算机科学技术学院）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）；Shanghai Key Laboratory of Intelligent Information Processing, Fudan University（复旦大学上海市智能信息处理重点实验室）
In dialogue systems, utterances with similar semantics may have distinctive emotions under different contexts. Therefore, modeling long-range contextual emotional relationships with speaker dependency plays a crucial part in dialogue emotion recognition. Meanwhile, distinguishing the different emotion categories is non-trivial since they usually have semantically similar sentiments. To this end, we adopt supervised contrastive learning to make different emotions mutually exclusive to identify similar emotions better. Meanwhile, we utilize an auxiliary response generation task to enhance the mo…
Knowledge of users' emotion states helps improve human-computer interaction. In this work, we presented EmoNet, an emotion detector of Chinese daily dialogues based on deep convolutional neural networks. In order to maintain the original linguistic features, such as the order, commonly used methods like segmentation and keywords extraction were not adopted, instead we increased the depth of CNN and tried to let CNN learn inner linguistic relationships. Our main contribution is that we presented a new model and a new pipeline which can be used in multi-language environment to solve sentimental …
ESCoT: Towards Interpretable Emotional Support Dialogue Systems
School of Information, Renmin University of China（中国人民大学信息学院）；Mental Health Education and Counseling Center, Renmin University of China（中国人民大学心理健康教育与咨询中心）
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）
Persuasive strategy recognition task requires the system to recognize the adopted strategy of the persuader according to the conversation. However, previous methods mainly focus on the contextual information, little is known about incorporating the psychological feedback, i.e. emotion of the persuadee, to predict the strategy. In this paper, we propose a Cross-channel Feedback memOry Network (CFO-Net) to leverage the emotional feedback to iteratively measure the potential benefits of strategies and incorporate them into the contextual-aware dialogue information. Specifically, CFO-Net designs a…
A humanized dialogue system is expected to generate empathetic replies, which should be sensitive to the users' expressed emotion. The task of empathetic dialogue generation is proposed to address this problem. The essential challenges lie in accurately capturing the nuances of human emotion and considering the potential of user feedback, which are overlooked by the majority of existing work. In response to this problem, we propose a multi-resolution adversarial model -- EmpDG, to generate more empathetic responses. EmpDG exploits both the coarse-grained dialogue-level and fine-grained token-l…
Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen)（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳））
A good empathetic dialogue system should first track and understand a user's emotion and then reply with an appropriate emotion. However, current approaches to this task either focus on improving the understanding of users' emotion or on proposing better responding strategies, and very few works consider both at the same time. Our work attempts to fill this vacancy. Inspired by task-oriented dialogue systems, we propose a novel empathetic response generation model with emotion-aware dialogue management. The emotion-aware dialogue management contains two parts: (1) Emotion state tracking mainta…
Research on emotionally intelligent dialogue generation based on automatic dialogue system
University of the People（人民大学）；Sehan University（世翰大学）；Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati（印度理工学院古瓦哈提分校）；Universidad Internacional Isabel I de Castilla（卡斯蒂利亚伊莎贝尔一世国际大学）；AMA University（AMA大学）
In recent years, Internet memes have been widely used in online chatting. Compared with text-based communication, conversations become more expressive and attractive when Internet memes are incorporated. This paper presents our solutions for the Meme incorporated Open-domain Dialogue (MOD) Challenge of DSTC10, where three tasks are involved: text response modeling, meme retrieval, and meme emotion classification. Firstly, we leverage a large-scale pre-trained dialogue model for coherent and informative response generation. Secondly, based on interaction-based text-matching, our approach can re…
The recognition of emotion and dialogue acts enriches conversational analysis and help to build natural dialogue systems. Emotion interpretation makes us understand feelings and dialogue acts reflect the intentions and performative functions in the utterances. However, most of the textual and multi-modal conversational emotion corpora contain only emotion labels but not dialogue acts. To address this problem, we propose to use a pool of various recurrent neural models trained on a dialogue act corpus, with and without context. These neural models annotate the emotion corpora with dialogue act …
While current dialogue systems like ChatGPT have made significant advancements in text-based interactions, they often overlook the potential of other modalities in enhancing the overall user experience. We present FaceChat, a web-based dialogue framework that enables emotionally-sensitive and face-to-face conversations. By seamlessly integrating cutting-edge technologies in natural language processing, computer vision, and speech processing, FaceChat delivers a highly immersive and engaging user experience. FaceChat framework has a wide range of potential applications, including counseling, em…
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…
Social chatbots have gained immense popularity, and their appeal lies not just in their capacity to respond to the diverse requests from users, but also in the ability to develop an emotional connection with users. To further develop and promote social chatbots, we need to concentrate on increasing user interaction and take into account both the intellectual and emotional quotient in the conversational agents. In this paper, we propose a multi-task framework that jointly identifies the emotion of a given dialogue and generates response in accordance to the identified emotion. We employ a BERT …
University of North Carolina at Charlotte（北卡罗来纳大学夏洛特分校）
Emotional language generation is one of the keys to human-like artificial intelligence. Humans use different type of emotions depending on the situation of the conversation. Emotions also play an important role in mediating the engagement level with conversational partners. However, current conversational agents do not effectively account for emotional content in the language generation process. To address this problem, we develop a language modeling approach that generates affective content when the dialogue is situated in a given context. We use the recently released Empathetic-Dialogues cor…
When Seekers Are Hard to Help: Evaluating Emotional Support Dialogue Systems in Worst-Case Interactions
Hubei Provincial Key Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence and Smart Learning（湖北人工智能与智能学习省级重点实验室）；National Language Resources Monitoring and Research Center for Network Media（网络媒体语言资源监测与研究中心）；School of Computer Science, Central China Normal University（华中师范大学计算机学院）；Faculty of Artificial Intelligence in Education, Central China Normal University（华中师范大学教育人工智能学院）；School of Chinese Language and Literature, Central China Normal University（华中师范大学中文语言文学学院）
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Meitu（美图）；The Hang Seng University of Hong Kong（香港恒生大学）
In this paper, we address three challenges in utterance-level emotion recognition in dialogue systems: (1) the same word can deliver different emotions in different contexts; (2) some emotions are rarely seen in general dialogues; (3) long-range contextual information is hard to be effectively captured. We therefore propose a hierarchical Gated Recurrent Unit (HiGRU) framework with a lower-level GRU to model the word-level inputs and an upper-level GRU to capture the contexts of utterance-level embeddings. Moreover, we promote the framework to two variants, HiGRU with individual features fusio…
State-of-the-art neural dialogue systems excel at syntactic and semantic modelling of language, but often have a hard time establishing emotional alignment with the human interactant during a conversation. In this work, we bring Affect Control Theory (ACT), a socio-mathematical model of emotions for human-human interactions, to the neural dialogue generation setting. ACT makes predictions about how humans respond to emotional stimuli in social situations. Due to this property, ACT and its derivative probabilistic models have been successfully deployed in several applications of Human-Computer …
Intention, emotion and action are important elements in human activities. Modeling the interaction process between individuals by analyzing the relationships between these elements is a challenging task. However, previous work mainly focused on modeling intention and emotion independently, and neglected of exploring the mutual relationships between intention and emotion. In this paper, we propose a RelAtion Interaction Network (RAIN), consisting of Intention Relation Module and Emotion Relation Module, to jointly model mutual relationships and explicitly integrate historical intention informat…
University of Sheffield（谢菲尔德大学）；Utrecht University（乌得勒支大学）；Zhejiang Wanli University（浙江万里大学信息与智能工程学院）
Understanding speaker's feelings and producing appropriate responses with emotion connection is a key communicative skill for empathetic dialogue systems. In this paper, we propose a simple technique called Affective Decoding for empathetic response generation. Our method can effectively incorporate emotion signals during each decoding step, and can additionally be augmented with an auxiliary dual emotion encoder, which learns separate embeddings for the speaker and listener given the emotion base of the dialogue. Extensive empirical studies show that our models are perceived to be more empath…
Neural network-based Open-ended conversational agents automatically generate responses based on predictive models learned from a large number of pairs of utterances. The generated responses are typically acceptable as a sentence but are often dull, generic, and certainly devoid of any emotion. In this paper, we present neural models that learn to express a given emotion in the generated response. We propose four models and evaluate them against 3 baselines. An encoder-decoder framework-based model with multiple attention layers provides the best overall performance in terms of expressing the r…
Learning from Implicit User Feedback, Emotions and Demographic Information in Task-Oriented and Document-Grounded Dialogues
Technical University of Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学）；Hessian Center for AI (hessian.AI)（黑森人工智能中心）；Department of Computer Science（计算机科学系）；Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing Lab (UKP Lab)（普适知识处理实验室）
Modern day conversational agents are trained to emulate the manner in which humans communicate. To emotionally bond with the user, these virtual agents need to be aware of the affective state of the user. Transformers are the recent state of the art in sequence-to-sequence learning that involves training an encoder-decoder model with word embeddings from utterance-response pairs. We propose an emotion-aware transformer encoder for capturing the emotional quotient in the user utterance in order to generate human-like empathetic responses. The contributions of our paper are as follows: 1) An emo…
Effectively recognising and applying emotions to interactions is a highly desirable trait for social robots. Implicitly understanding how subjects experience different kinds of actions and objects in the world is crucial for natural HRI interactions, with the possibility to perform positive actions and avoid negative actions. In this paper, we utilize the NICO robot's appearance and capabilities to give the NICO the ability to model a coherent affective association between a perceived auditory stimulus and a temporally asynchronous emotion expression. This is done by combining evaluations of e…
UCLA Center for Vision, Cognition, Learning, and Autonomy（加州大学洛杉矶分校视觉、认知、学习与自主中心）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）
Building a socially intelligent agent involves many challenges, one of which is to teach the agent to speak guided by its value like a human. However, value-driven chatbots are still understudied in the area of dialogue systems. Most existing datasets focus on commonsense reasoning or social norm modeling. In this work, we present a new large-scale human value dataset called ValueNet, which contains human attitudes on 21,374 text scenarios. The dataset is organized in ten dimensions that conform to the basic human value theory in intercultural research. We further develop a Transformer-based v…
An Offline Mobile Conversational Agent for Mental Health Support: Learning from Emotional Dialogues and Psychological Texts with Student-Centered Evaluation
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Bhopal（电子工程与计算机科学系，比哈尔印度科学教育与研究中心）
École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne（洛桑联邦理工学院）
We propose a novel large-scale emotional dialogue dataset, consisting of 1M dialogues retrieved from the OpenSubtitles corpus and annotated with 32 emotions and 9 empathetic response intents using a BERT-based fine-grained dialogue emotion classifier. This work explains the complex pipeline used to preprocess movie subtitles and select good movie dialogues to annotate. We also describe the semi-supervised learning process followed to train a fine-grained emotion classifier to annotate these dialogues. Despite the large set of labels, our dialogue emotion classifier achieved an accuracy of $65\…
Taiwan International Graduate Program（台湾国际研究生学程）；National Tsing Hua University（台湾清华大学）；Academia Sinica（中央研究院）
We present an overview of the EmotionX 2019 Challenge, held at the 7th International Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Social Media (SocialNLP), in conjunction with IJCAI 2019. The challenge entailed predicting emotions in spoken and chat-based dialogues using augmented EmotionLines datasets. EmotionLines contains two distinct datasets: the first includes excerpts from a US-based TV sitcom episode scripts (Friends) and the second contains online chats (EmotionPush). A total of thirty-six teams registered to participate in the challenge. Eleven of the teams successfully submitted thei…
The long-standing goal of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been to create human-like conversational systems. Such systems should have the ability to develop an emotional connection with the users, hence emotion recognition in dialogues is an important task. Emotion detection in dialogues is a challenging task because humans usually convey multiple emotions with varying degrees of intensities in a single utterance. Moreover, emotion in an utterance of a dialogue may be dependent on previous utterances making the task more complex. Emotion recognition has always been in great demand. However, mo…
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）
Detecting emotion from dialogue is a challenge that has not yet been extensively surveyed. One could consider the emotion of each dialogue turn to be independent, but in this paper, we introduce a hierarchical approach to classify emotion, hypothesizing that the current emotional state depends on previous latent emotions. We benchmark several feature-based classifiers using pre-trained word and emotion embeddings, state-of-the-art end-to-end neural network models, and Gaussian processes for automatic hyper-parameter search. In our experiments, hierarchical architectures consistently give signi…
Deep Learning Research and Application Centre（深度学习研究与应用中心）；Hang Seng Management College（恒生管理学院）
In this paper, we propose a self-attentive bidirectional long short-term memory (SA-BiLSTM) network to predict multiple emotions for the EmotionX challenge. The BiLSTM exhibits the power of modeling the word dependencies, and extracting the most relevant features for emotion classification. Building on top of BiLSTM, the self-attentive network can model the contextual dependencies between utterances which are helpful for classifying the ambiguous emotions. We achieve 59.6 and 55.0 unweighted accuracy scores in the \textit{Friends} and the \textit{EmotionPush} test sets, respectively.
Artificial Intelligence Application Research Center, Huawei Technologies（华为技术有限公司人工智能应用研究中心）
In this paper, we describe a data enhancement method for developing Emily, an emotion-affective open-domain chatbot. The proposed method is based on explicitly modeling positively transitioned (PT) sentiment data from multi-turn dialogues. We construct a dialogue corpus with PT sentiment data and will release it for public use. By fine-tuning a pretrained dialogue model using the produced PT-enhanced dialogues, we are able to develop an emotion-affective open-domain chatbot exhibiting close-to-human performance in various emotion-affective metrics. We evaluate Emily against a few state-of-the-…
Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Pattern Recognition Center, WeChat AI, Tencent Inc（腾讯公司微信人工智能模式识别中心）
Researches on dialogue empathy aim to endow an agent with the capacity of accurate understanding and proper responding for emotions. Existing models for empathetic dialogue generation focus on the emotion flow in one direction, that is, from the context to response. We argue that conducting an empathetic conversation is a bidirectional process, where empathy occurs when the emotions of two interlocutors could converge on the same point, i.e., reaching an emotion consensus. Besides, we also find that the empathetic dialogue corpus is extremely limited, which further restricts the model performa…
University of Warwick（华威大学）；Southeast University（东南大学）
Emotion detection in dialogues is challenging as it often requires the identification of thematic topics underlying a conversation, the relevant commonsense knowledge, and the intricate transition patterns between the affective states. In this paper, we propose a Topic-Driven Knowledge-Aware Transformer to handle the challenges above. We firstly design a topic-augmented language model (LM) with an additional layer specialized for topic detection. The topic-augmented LM is then combined with commonsense statements derived from a knowledge base based on the dialogue contextual information. Final…
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）；WeChat AI, Tencent Inc（腾讯公司微信AI）
Empathy, which is widely used in psychological counselling, is a key trait of everyday human conversations. Equipped with commonsense knowledge, current approaches to empathetic response generation focus on capturing implicit emotion within dialogue context, where the emotions are treated as a static variable throughout the conversations. However, emotions change dynamically between utterances, which makes previous works difficult to perceive the emotion flow and predict the correct emotion of the target response, leading to inappropriate response. Furthermore, simply importing commonsense kno…
