Abstract
Expressing empathy is a trait in human daily conversation, in which people are willing to give responses containing appropriate emotions and topics on the basis of understanding the interlocutor’s situation. However, empathetic dialogue models trained by data-driven training method tend to generate general responses, which are usually monotonous and difficult to infuse emotions and topics concurrently. To solve this issue, we propose a novel model that generates two sub-responses, namely, emotion feedback and topic discussion, then integrates them to optimize empathetic responses. Specifically, in the sub-response generation stage, we introduce emotion lexicon and commonsense knowledge to make sub-responses focus on emotional words and topic-related words respectively, which drives the sub-responses to be contextually related from different perspectives. Afterward, we utilize cross attention to integrate the global information to optimize the final response. Our model is trained on the pre-trained language model BART. Experimental results show that our method can generate responses involving emotion and topic well, and compared with existing methods, empathy and relevance are improved. Our code is available at https://github.com/outsider-lj/edsgi_bart.
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This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (61672144, 61872072).
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Li, J., Han, D., Feng, S., Zhang, Y. (2023). Optimizing Empathetic Response by Generating and Integrating Emotion Feedback and Topic Discussion. In: Wang, X., et al. Database Systems for Advanced Applications. DASFAA 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13945. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30675-4_46
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30675-4_46
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