Papers
Topics
Authors
Recent
Gemini 2.5 Flash
Gemini 2.5 Flash
41 tokens/sec
GPT-4o
59 tokens/sec
Gemini 2.5 Pro Pro
41 tokens/sec
o3 Pro
7 tokens/sec
GPT-4.1 Pro
50 tokens/sec
DeepSeek R1 via Azure Pro
28 tokens/sec
2000 character limit reached

Dynamic Demonstration Retrieval and Cognitive Understanding for Emotional Support Conversation (2404.02505v1)

Published 3 Apr 2024 in cs.CL and cs.AI

Abstract: Emotional Support Conversation (ESC) systems are pivotal in providing empathetic interactions, aiding users through negative emotional states by understanding and addressing their unique experiences. In this paper, we tackle two key challenges in ESC: enhancing contextually relevant and empathetic response generation through dynamic demonstration retrieval, and advancing cognitive understanding to grasp implicit mental states comprehensively. We introduce Dynamic Demonstration Retrieval and Cognitive-Aspect Situation Understanding (\ourwork), a novel approach that synergizes these elements to improve the quality of support provided in ESCs. By leveraging in-context learning and persona information, we introduce an innovative retrieval mechanism that selects informative and personalized demonstration pairs. We also propose a cognitive understanding module that utilizes four cognitive relationships from the ATOMIC knowledge source to deepen situational awareness of help-seekers' mental states. Our supportive decoder integrates information from diverse knowledge sources, underpinning response generation that is both empathetic and cognitively aware. The effectiveness of \ourwork is demonstrated through extensive automatic and human evaluations, revealing substantial improvements over numerous state-of-the-art models, with up to 13.79\% enhancement in overall performance of ten metrics. Our codes are available for public access to facilitate further research and development.

PDF HTML Abstract
Ai Sparkles Streamline Icon: https://streamlinehq.com Summarize File Document Download Save Streamline Icon: https://streamlinehq.com PDF File Document Download Save Streamline Icon: https://streamlinehq.com Markdown Bookmark Chat Bubble Oval Streamline Icon: https://streamlinehq.com Chat (Pro)
Definition Search Book Streamline Icon: https://streamlinehq.com
References (48)
  1. COMET: Commonsense Transformers for Automatic Knowledge Graph Construction. In Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. 4762–4779.
  2. Skeleton-to-Response: Dialogue Generation Guided by Retrieval Memory. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers). 1219–1228.
  3. Retrieval-guided dialogue response generation via a matching-to-generation framework. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP). 1866–1875.
  4. Data-Juicer: A One-Stop Data Processing System for Large Language Models. In International Conference on Management of Data.
  5. Knowledge-aware Textual Entailment with Graph Attention Network. In Proceedings of the 28th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (Beijing, China) (CIKM ’19). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 2145–2148. https://doi.org/10.1145/3357384.3358071
  6. DialogVED: A Pre-trained Latent Variable Encoder-Decoder Model for Dialog Response Generation. In Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 4852–4864.
  7. PAL: Persona-Augmented Emotional Support Conversation Generation. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023, Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, and Naoaki Okazaki (Eds.). Association for Computational Linguistics, Toronto, Canada, 535–554. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2023.findings-acl.34
  8. Improving Multi-turn Emotional Support Dialogue Generation with Lookahead Strategy Planning. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 3014–3026.
  9. Knowledge-enhanced Mixed-initiative Dialogue System for Emotional Support Conversations. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, and Naoaki Okazaki (Eds.). Association for Computational Linguistics, Toronto, Canada, 4079–4095. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.225
  10. Dialog-to-action: Conversational question answering over a large-scale knowledge base. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 31 (2018).
  11. Controlling Dialogue Generation with Semantic Exemplars. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies. 3018–3029.
  12. Generating sentences by editing prototypes. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics 6 (2018), 437–450.
  13. Clara E Hill. 2009. Helping skills: Facilitating, exploration, insight, and action. American Psychological Association.
  14. Fid-light: Efficient and effective retrieval-augmented text generation. In Proceedings of the 46th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval. 1437–1447.
  15. Enhancing Multimodal Large Language Models with Vision Detection Models: An Empirical Study. arXiv:2401.17981 [cs.CV]
  16. Natural questions: a benchmark for question answering research. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics 7 (2019), 453–466.
  17. DQ-HGAN: A heterogeneous graph attention network based deep Q-learning for emotional support conversation generation. Knowledge-Based Systems 283 (2024), 111201.
  18. A Diversity-Promoting Objective Function for Neural Conversation Models. In Proceedings of the 2016 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies. 110–119.
  19. Knowledge bridging for empathetic dialogue generation. In Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 36. 10993–11001.
  20. Chin-Yew Lin. 2004. Rouge: A package for automatic evaluation of summaries. In Text summarization branches out. 74–81.
  21. EmoUS: Simulating User Emotions in Task-Oriented Dialogues. In Proceedings of the 46th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval. 2526–2531.
  22. Towards Emotional Support Dialog Systems. In Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers). 3469–3483.
  23. Exemplars-guided Empathetic Response Generation Controlled by the Elements of Human Communication. arXiv preprint arXiv:2106.11791 (2021).
  24. MIME: MIMicking Emotions for Empathetic Response Generation. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). 8968–8979.
  25. Rethinking the Role of Demonstrations: What Makes In-Context Learning Work?. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 11048–11064.
  26. Bleu: a method for automatic evaluation of machine translation. In Proceedings of the 40th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. 311–318.
  27. Control Globally, Understand Locally: A Global-to-Local Hierarchical Graph Network for Emotional Support Conversation. In International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:248406141
  28. Fado: Feedback-aware double controlling network for emotional support conversation. Knowledge-Based Systems 264 (2023), 110340.
  29. Thilina C Rajapakse. 2023. Dense Passage Retrieval: Architectures and Augmentation Methods. In Proceedings of the 46th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval. 3494–3494.
  30. Towards Empathetic Open-domain Conversation Models: A New Benchmark and Dataset. In Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. 5370–5381.
  31. Recipes for Building an Open-Domain Chatbot. In Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume. 300–325.
  32. Cem: Commonsense-aware empathetic response generation. In Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 36. 11229–11237.
  33. Atomic: An atlas of machine commonsense for if-then reasoning. In Proceedings of the AAAI conference on artificial intelligence, Vol. 33. 3027–3035.
  34. Towards facilitating empathic conversations in online mental health support: A reinforcement learning approach. In Proceedings of the Web Conference 2021. 194–205.
  35. Knowledge enhanced reflection generation for counseling dialogues. In Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 3096–3107.
  36. Retrieval Augmentation Reduces Hallucination in Conversation. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021. 3784–3803.
  37. Sequence to sequence learning with neural networks. Advances in neural information processing systems 27 (2014).
  38. MISC: A Mixed Strategy-Aware Model integrating COMET for Emotional Support Conversation. In Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 308–319.
  39. Developing human/AI interactions for chat-based customer services: lessons learned from the Norwegian government. European journal of information systems 32, 1 (2023), 10–22.
  40. Retrieve and Refine: Improved Sequence Generation Models For Dialogue. In Proceedings of the 2018 EMNLP Workshop SCAI: The 2nd International Workshop on Search-Oriented Conversational AI. 87–92.
  41. Response generation by context-aware prototype editing. In Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 33. 7281–7288.
  42. A sequential matching framework for multi-turn response selection in retrieval-based chatbots. Computational Linguistics 45, 1 (2019), 163–197.
  43. COSPLAY: Concept set guided personalized dialogue generation across both party personas. In Proceedings of the 45th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval. 201–211.
  44. A Personalized Dense Retrieval Framework for Unified Information Access. In Proceedings of the 46th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (¡conf-loc¿, ¡city¿Taipei¡/city¿, ¡country¿Taiwan¡/country¿, ¡/conf-loc¿) (SIGIR ’23). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 121–130. https://doi.org/10.1145/3539618.3591626
  45. TransESC: Smoothing Emotional Support Conversation via Turn-Level State Transition. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023, Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, and Naoaki Okazaki (Eds.). Association for Computational Linguistics, Toronto, Canada, 6725–6739. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2023.findings-acl.420
  46. Emotional chatting machine: Emotional conversation generation with internal and external memory. In Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 32.
  47. Facilitating Multi-turn Emotional Support Conversation with Positive Emotion Elicitation: A Reinforcement Learning Approach. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 1714–1729.
  48. CASE: Aligning Coarse-to-Fine Cognition and Affection for Empathetic Response Generation. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, and Naoaki Okazaki (Eds.). Association for Computational Linguistics, Toronto, Canada, 8223–8237. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.457
User Edit Pencil Streamline Icon: https://streamlinehq.com
Authors (6)
  1. Zhe Xu (199 papers)
  2. Daoyuan Chen (32 papers)
  3. Jiayi Kuang (5 papers)
  4. Zihao Yi (3 papers)
  5. Yaliang Li (117 papers)
  6. Ying Shen (76 papers)
Citations (1)
View on Semantic Scholar