Abstract

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 three key factors of empathy expression in a hierarchical way. We show experimentally that our CoMAE-based model can generate more empathetic responses than previous methods. We also highlight the importance of hierarchical modeling of different factors through both the empirical analysis on a real-life corpus and the extensive experiments. Our codes and used data are available at this https URL.

Highlights

  • Empathy, which refers to the capacity to understand or feel what another person is experiencing (Rothschild, 2006; Read, 2019), is a critical capability to open-domain dialog systems (Zhou et al, 2018b)

  • It is worth noting that while CoMAE only contains the three factors, such hierarchical framework can be naturally extended to more factors that relate to empathy expression

  • We analyze the results from the following three perspectives: General Performance Our model achieves the best performance on all the metrics on both do

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Summary

Introduction

Empathy, which refers to the capacity to understand or feel what another person is experiencing (Rothschild, 2006; Read, 2019), is a critical capability to open-domain dialog systems (Zhou et al, 2018b). Empathetic conversational models can improve user satisfaction and receive more positive feedback in numerous domains (Klein, 1998; Liu and Picard, 2005; Brave et al, 2005; Fitzpatrick et al, 2017; Liu et al, 2021). There have been numerous works devoted to improving the dialog models’ ability to understand the feelings of interlocutors (Rashkin et al, 2019; Lin et al, 2019; Majumder act taken in the conversation (De Vignemont and Singer, 2006), such as questioning (e.g., What’s wrong with it?), consoling (e.g., You’ll get through this), etc. Sharma et al (2020) further characterizes the text-based expressed empathy based on the above two aspects as three communication mechanisms, which is a more higher-level and abstract factor that relates to empathy expression.

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