Empathetic Persuasion: Reinforcing Empathy and Persuasiveness in Dialogue Systems

Azlaan Mustafa Samad, Kshitij Mishra, Mauajama Firdaus, Asif Ekbal


Abstract
Persuasion is an intricate process involving empathetic connection between two individuals. Plain persuasive responses may make a conversation non-engaging. Even the most well-intended and reasoned persuasive conversations can fall through in the absence of empathetic connection between the speaker and listener. In this paper, we propose a novel task of incorporating empathy when generating persuasive responses. We develop an empathetic persuasive dialogue system by fine-tuning a maximum likelihood Estimation (MLE)-based language model in a reinforcement learning (RL) framework. To design feedbacks for our RL-agent, we define an effective and efficient reward function considering consistency, repetitiveness, emotion and persuasion rewards to ensure consistency, non-repetitiveness, empathy and persuasiveness in the generated responses. Due to lack of emotion annotated persuasive data, we first annotate the existing Persuaion For Good dataset with emotions, then build transformer based classifiers to provide emotion based feedbacks to our RL agent. Experimental results confirm that our proposed model increases the rate of generating persuasive responses as compared to the available state-of-the-art dialogue models while making the dialogues empathetically more engaging and retaining the language quality in responses.
Anthology ID:
2022.findings-naacl.63
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2022
Month:
July
Year:
2022
Address:
Seattle, United States
Editors:
Marine Carpuat, Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Ivan Vladimir Meza Ruiz
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
844–856
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-naacl.63
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.findings-naacl.63
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Azlaan Mustafa Samad, Kshitij Mishra, Mauajama Firdaus, and Asif Ekbal. 2022. Empathetic Persuasion: Reinforcing Empathy and Persuasiveness in Dialogue Systems. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2022, pages 844–856, Seattle, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Empathetic Persuasion: Reinforcing Empathy and Persuasiveness in Dialogue Systems (Samad et al., Findings 2022)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-naacl.63.pdf
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