Improving Empathetic Response Generation by Recognizing Emotion Cause in Conversations

Jun Gao, Yuhan Liu, Haolin Deng, Wei Wang, Yu Cao, Jiachen Du, Ruifeng Xu


Abstract
Current approaches to empathetic response generation focus on learning a model to predict an emotion label and generate a response based on this label and have achieved promising results. However, the emotion cause, an essential factor for empathetic responding, is ignored. The emotion cause is a stimulus for human emotions. Recognizing the emotion cause is helpful to better understand human emotions so as to generate more empathetic responses. To this end, we propose a novel framework that improves empathetic response generation by recognizing emotion cause in conversations. Specifically, an emotion reasoner is designed to predict a context emotion label and a sequence of emotion cause-oriented labels, which indicate whether the word is related to the emotion cause. Then we devise both hard and soft gated attention mechanisms to incorporate the emotion cause into response generation. Experiments show that incorporating emotion cause information improves the performance of the model on both emotion recognition and response generation.
Anthology ID:
2021.findings-emnlp.70
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
807–819
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.70
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.findings-emnlp.70
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jun Gao, Yuhan Liu, Haolin Deng, Wei Wang, Yu Cao, Jiachen Du, and Ruifeng Xu. 2021. Improving Empathetic Response Generation by Recognizing Emotion Cause in Conversations. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021, pages 807–819, Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Improving Empathetic Response Generation by Recognizing Emotion Cause in Conversations (Gao et al., Findings 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.70.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.70.mp4
Data
ECE